Quotes About Perspective

Mr May, you reach a certain age when you don't have enemies any more, just people who find you mildly annoying.

Life is a very beautiful dream, he thought. I'm so glad I chose not to wake up from it just yet.

Fair point. I suppose dressing up in hot countries simply involves putting on shoes. A bit like Wales.

he wasn't going to grow up to be his father. Charlie never wanted to make anyone feel the way he felt right now.

Time spent arguing is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.

We live only a few conscious decades, and we fret ourselves enough for several lifetimes.

The problem with open-mindedness is that it can become empty-mindedness

It is pardonable for children to yell that they believe in fairies, but it is somehow sinister when the piping note shifts from the puerile to the senile.

Did I ever think I might have been wrong? Yes, sometimes and briefly. But never because of the supposed majority against me.

It's only when you have grazed on the lower slopes of your own ignorance and begun to understand the great vistas of nonknowledge that you have, that you can claim to have been educated at all.

If we stay with animal analogies for a moment, owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are god. (Cats may sometimes share the cold entrails of a kill with you, but this is just what a god might do if he was in a good mood.)

Ethiopians imagine their gods as black and snub-nosed; Thracians blue-eyed and red-haired. But if horses or lions had hands, or could draw and fashion works as men do, horses would draw the gods shaped like horses and lions like lions, making the gods resemble themselves. Xenophanes

but now that I view the scene in retrospect I see it as a very gentle and firm deportation, taking me from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady.

Whatever view one takes of the outcome being affected by morale, it seems certain that the realm of illusion must be escaped before anything else.

The point of protesting about 'moral equivalence' is surely not to blur moral choices on 'our side'. Is it?

Image and perception are everything, and those who possess them have the ability to determine their own myth, to be taken at their own valuation.

What if, I never tire of asking, we said 'Secret Council' instead of the archaic and therefore cuddly 'Privy Council'?

But we do believe in religion—at least for other people. It is a means of marketing hope, and of instilling ethical precepts on the cheap.

Don't write in to ask whether I would prefer Gingrich to Clinton. Ask, rather, whether Clinton prefers Gingrich to you. Go triangulate yourself.

But we do believe in religion—at least for other people. It is a means of marketing hope, and of instilling ethical precepts on the cheap. It is also a form of discipline.

When the book was published, I had just turned sixty-one. I am writing this at a moment when, according to my doctors, I cannot be certain of celebrating another birthday.

Olen tiennyt polttavani kynttilää molemmista päistä ja todennut sen usein luovan oikein miellyttävää valoa.

the awareness that the distinction between "over here" and "over there," or between "home" and "abroad" is often a false one has never left me.

Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centered and even solipsistic.