Quotes About Perspective

It kindled in me a resolution which I have tried to keep ever since: to spend at least once every year a little time in a country less fortunate than my own. (If

Don't say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really was a boy, in which case you have probably thrown away a better intro.

Christopher Hitchens

If someone tells me that I've hurt their feelings, I say, 'I'm still waiting to hear what your point is.

And do you think that unto such as you A maggot-minded, starved, fanatic crew God gave a secret, and denied it me? Well, well—what matters it? Believe that, too! —THE RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM (RICHARD LE GALLIENNE TRANSLATION)

Since it's not really avoidable, I think the question is how to—if you like—turn [hatred] to advantage.... It's a bit like alcohol, if you like. It's a good servant, but it's a bad master.

One page, one paragraph, of Hawking is more awe-inspiring, to say nothing of being more instructive, than the whole of Genesis and the whole of Ezekiel.

My father had died, and very swiftly too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was seventy-nine. I am sixty-one. In whatever kind of 'race' life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.

In point of fact, we do not have the option of choosing absolute truth, or faith. We only have the right to say, of those who do claim to know the truth of revelation, that they are deceiving themselves and attempting to deceive - or to intimidate - others.

these are the rewards of maturity, to be enjoyed only as we decline. We

There's a small paradox here; the job of supposed intellectuals is to combat oversimplification or reductionism and to say, well, actually, it's more complicated than that.

I myself hope to live long enough to graduate from being a 'bad boy,' which I once was, to becoming a curmudgeon....

fueron capaces de señalar que si los triángulos tuvieran dioses, sus dioses tendrían tres lados

George feels that, even if all this double talk hasn't brought them any closer to understanding each other, the not-understanding, the readiness to remain at cross-purposes, is in itself a kind of intimacy.

Never mind. Never mind. In this brief life, one cannot always be counting the cost.

No, Geo—underneath all that, Nan really loves me. It's just she wants me to see things her way. You know, she's two years older; that meant a lot when we were children. I've always thought of her as being sort of like a road—I mean, she leads somewhere. With her, I'll never lose my way.

Now, for example, people with freckles aren't thought of as a minority by the non-freckled. They aren't a minority in the sense we're talking about. And why aren't they? Because a minority is only thought of as a minority when it constitutes some kind of a threat to the majority, real or imaginary. And no threat is ever quite imaginary.

Biliyor musun, senle ben -garip ÅŸey- ayn? yolun yolcusuyuz asl?nda. Ä°kimizin de evleri biraz büyükçe ama gene de bir bak?ma bize dar geliyor.

Öyle konular vard?r ki yaÅŸamda, sana soruluncaya kadar kendin bile bunlar? bildiÄŸini bilmezsin.

The gramophone keeps reiterating a statement about life with which I do not agree.

it's about experience. They keep telling you, when you're older, you'll have experience—and that's supposed to be so great. What would you say about that, sir? Is it really any use, would you say?

The pension was run by a happy-go-lucky Englishman, who used to laugh at my industry and tell me I ought to go swimming, while I was still young. "After all, old boy, I mean to say, will it matter a hundred years from now if you wrote that yarn or not?

It does appear, then, that what you find in the landscape of the Old Testament when you 'get there' very much depends on whom you take with you and through whose eyes you view it.

Laypeople. They think everything in the past happened at the same time.