Quotes About Perspective

Dieve--but I'm glad I'm not a hog.

universe to be questioned or understood. All that a mere man could do, it seemed to Jurgis, was to take a thing like this as he found it, and do as he was told; to be given a place in it and a share in its wonderful activities was a blessing to be grateful for, as one was grateful for the sunshine and the rain.

No easy matter to stick to the conviction that your point of view is right and that all the people about you are wrong. That is the way not merely with pioneers of thought, with heroes, saints, and martyrs, but also with lunatics and "nuts," of whom there are millions in the world. When one of these "nuts" succeeds in persuading the greater part of a great nation that he is right, the five per cent have to stop and ask themselves: "How come?

Lanny knew that it wouldn't do any good to pursue the subject, because this man of great affairs would pay no attention to what a Pink might say. Robbie was just like Irma, he refused to believe that the Nazis were as bad as they advertised themselves, and he found excuses for each and every evil deed that was brought to his attention.

You have many advantages over him, but there's one advantage he has over you. He knows a lot more about you than you know about him. Also, he understands your ideas better than you understand his.

but no, if she had been here, he would have been driven to take the side against her. This wasn't perversity, he would insist; he was trying to see the problem from all of its many sides, and argued against all persons who wanted to see only one side.

wartime it appeared that nobody wanted to see both sides of any question.

Lanny felt that he had learned more about Spain in this village than in any of the great cities.

He smiled gently, being sorry for her. "Mother dear, I am one of those unlucky people who have to stand in the middle and get the brickbats from both sides. I see the good in both and I see the evil. But if you point that out the fanatics on both sides want to kill you.

Tell him anything that I have said to you. That is the advantage of my position; I tell them the whole truth, and it is as if I had said nothing, for they do not believe me.

I am like a man who looks at one side of a coin and then at the other, and they are different, and he can't decide which is the coin. I see co-operation, and that delights me; then I see repression, and that repels me. Which is the coin?

In wartime it appeared that nobody wanted to see both sides of any question. IV

Hilda was philosophical. That means you think everything will turn out for best, according to my father. Or if you don't actually think it, you pretend to.

Cuba is painful for me, too. It hurts to always feel like a foreigner, with your roots exposed, with this feeling that everything is temporary, that life is back there in a future that never seems to get here. What has happened to us is very hard, but there are so many who have it so much worse.

The only thing I can recommend at this stage is a sense of humor, an ability to see things in their ridiculous and absurd dimensions, to laugh at others and at ourselves, a sense of irony regarding everything that calls out for parody in this world. In other words, I can only recommend perspective and distance.

paradise seemed further away than India, but Hell had become a bit closer

He spoke about Africa in an unusual way. He spoke of Africa as though Africa was a sick child and he was the parent.

Ah, sahib. I know you just come to comfort a old man left to live by hisself. Soomintra say I too old-fashion. And Leela, she always by you. Why you don't sit down, sahib? It ain't dirty. Is just how it does look.' Ganesh didn't sit down. 'Ramlogan, I come to buy over your taxis.

Small things can start us off in new ways of thinking, and I was started off by the postage stamps of our area.

Because they could assess themselves, the Europeans were better equipped to cope with changes than we were.

I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs. You refer to yourself in order to understand other people. That's the novelist's gift, isn't it?

India is for me a difficult country. It isn't my home and cannot be my home; and yet I cannot reject it or be indifferent to it; I cannot travel only for the sights. I am at once too close and too far.

The news about Eddoes and the shoes travelled round the street pretty quickly. My mother was annoyed. She said, 'You see what sort of thing life is. Here I is, working my finger to the bone. Nobody flinging me a pair of shoes just like that, you know. And there you got that thin-arse little man, doing next to nothing, and look at all the things he does get.

Stephen Jay Gould