Quotes About Perspective

Happiness depends more upon the internal frame of a person's own mind, than on the externals in the world.

Worry is the intrest paid by those who borrow trouble.

Is there anything more beautiful than gold?" - Freya's question. Plain-thoughted Thor spoke. "A farm at first light Is more beautiful than gold, or A ship's sails in the mist. Many ordinary things are far more beautiful.

We must be satisfied with the soup that is set before us, and not desire to see the bones of the ox out of which it has been boiled.

American power made it possible for Europeans to believe that power was no longer important." -Robert Kagan

Men are often biased in their judgment on account of their sympathy and their interests.

Shall I wasting in despairDie because a woman's fair?Or make pale my cheeks with care'Cause another's rosy are?Be she fairer than the day,Or the flow'ry meads in May,If she be not so to me,What care I how fair she be?

Each of us is incomplete compared to someone else -- an animal's incomplete compared to a person... and a person compared to God, who is complete only to be imaginary.

Mine is a parish like all the rest.  They're all alike.  Those of to-day I mean.  I was saying so only yesterday to M. le Curé de Norenfontes—that good and evil are probably evenly distributed, but on such a low plane, very low Indeed! Or if you like they lie one over the other; like oil and water they never mix.  M. le Curé only laughed at me.

Oh, everybody knows that although they may be hard workers, they are not easy to deal with, and they've skimmed the district for all the cream they can get. But after all, though they may rob us, at least they respect us. That makes for a kind of social solidarity between us and them—deplore it or not, it exists, and everything that exists should be used for some good purpose.

Cuando a los sabios se les agota la sabiduría, conviene escuchar a los niños.

The shabbiest tuppeny doll will rejoice a baby's heart for half the year, but your mature gentleman will go yawning his head off at a five-hundred-franc gadget. And why? Because he has lost the soul of childhood.

I don't know whether war is an interlude during peace, or peace an interlude during war.

One of the most obvious results of having a baby around the house is to turn two good people into complete idiots who probably wouldn't have been much worse than mere imbeciles without it.

We do not know the true value of our moments until they have undergone the test of memory.

Question your tea spoons.

Oh, the sudden change of perspective brought about by travel and absence! How different everything was here: the people in the streets, the houses, the color of the air, the sky above the roofs, a low sky, very close, with molded clouds, and which looked as if it had come out of a painting. A unique setting, a subtle atmosphere of silvery greys, the patina of centuries on the old walls—a shimmering marvel for the eyes of a painter. ("The Dead Town")

Some say they see poetry in my paintings I see only science.

Human tragedies are always simple when we reconsider them in retrospect.

Somewhere in the Andes, they believe to this very day that the future is behind you. It comes up from behind your back, surprising and unforeseeable, while the past is always before your eyes, that which has already happened. When they talk about the past, the people of the Aymara tribe point in front of them. You walk forward facing the past and you turn back toward the future.

There is no time machine except the human being.

There is something in this Lametrie, a nice slip of our anthropocentrism. Why should Man be at the hub of all analogies? How would plants describe us, I wonder, what classification would they impose upon us? 'Described by a Plant' sounds like a good title to be used later. I feel we're being watched: by rubber plants, sparrow-grass, bonsai, small date palms, Chinese roses, geraniums and lemon trees. They keep an eye on us.

Lotte, I asked without beating around the bush, what decade would you choose—the sixties, the seventies, or the eighties? She fell silent for a moment and gave the best answer that can be given to such a question: I'd like to be twelve years old in each of them. That would be my answer, too.

Without someone to set the pendulum's swing, we wouldn't know where to find the middle. None of us in the business of making changes gets everything we want, the extremists allow us to look like moderates and to go after changes that will make a difference.