Quotes About Perspective

It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.

Life is nothing but a cock and bull story, and one of the best of its kind.

The problem is not that dolphins are dumber than we thought, but that our anthropomorphism inevitably makes it hard to understand an intelligence other than our own.

The good thing about being with a woman who has amnesia is that the conversation gets to be all about you

it is in how you meet the conditions of life that the quality of life inheres, not in the events or circumstances themselves.

When two people who love each other cannot come into agreement after substantial discussion, it is perfectly appropriate to agree to disagree without raining judgment down on each others' heads. For most people, there are some entrenched beliefs and opinions which will not change, regardless of persuasion or coercion.

Your view of the world is just as skewed as someone who has never seen combat... We all state our convictions from within our convictions.

You always get paid in cash. It's Rule One. If I'd been around to advise the Indians, do you think I'd have let them take beads for Manhattan? Hell, no.

L'umorismo va distinto dall'ironia. ?ando si fa dell'ironia si ride degli altri. ?ando si fa dell'umorismo si ride con gli altri. L'ironia ingenera tensioni e confli?i. L'umorismo quando usato nella misura giusta e nel momento giusto (e se non è usato nella misura giusta e nel momento giusto non è umorismo) è il solvente per eccellenza per sgonfiare tensioni, risolvere situazioni altrimenti penose, facilitare rapporti e relazioni umane.

One place is as good as another, in the valley without exit...

Ever since we discovered that Earth is round and turns like a mad spinning-top, we have understood that reality is not as it appears to us.

If I ask whether two events—one on Earth and the other on Proxima b—are happening "at the same moment," the correct answer would be: "It's a question that doesn't make sense, because there is no such thing as 'the same moment' definable in the universe." The "present of the universe" is meaningless.

What opens our minds and shows the limits of our ideas is an encounter with other people, other cultures, other ideas.

The world is complex, and we capture it with different languages, each appropriate to the process that we are describing.

Things change only in relation to one another. At a fundamental level, there is no time.

Being aware that we may be wrong is different from claiming that it is senseless to speak of right and wrong. Recognizing diversity and taking seriously ideas that diverge from our own is different from claiming that all ideas are equally worthy. Knowing that a given judgment is born within a complex cultural context and is related to many others does not necessarily imply that we are unable to recognize it is wrong.

Science is about reading the world from a gradually widening point of view.

I believe that we need to adapt our philosophy to our science, and not our science to our philosophy.

A university student attending lectures on general relativity i the morning and others on quantum mechanics in the afternoon might be forgiven for thinking that his professors are fools, or have neglected to communicate with each other for at least a century.

Children grow up and discover that the world is not as it seemed from within the four walls of their homes. Humankind as a whole does the same.

What I see, in other words, is not a reproduction of the external world. It is what I expect, corrected by what I can grasp. The relevant input is not that which confirms what we already know, but that which contradicts our expectations.

Those who defend this way of thinking about reality—eternalism—frequently cite Einstein, who in a famous letter writes: For people like us who believe in physics the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

Newton's mechanics, Maxwell's equations, quantum mechanics, and so on, tell us how events happen, not how things are.

En el mar inmenso de galaxias y estrellas, somos un apartado rincón infinitesimal; entre los infinitos arabescos de formas que componen lo real, nosotros no somos más que un garabato entre muchos.