Quotes About Perspective

How the more you looked, the more you gleaned. All the 'ways of seeing' that John Berger wrote about.

Most of the time, he found it hard to explain to his wife that his work as a sofer—a scribe of God's holy languages—made him rich, despite the very few maravedis it earned them. But as he looked at her, smiling slightly as she cleared the table, he was glad that for once she seemed to understand him.

asked how, if he never had spoken before to women outside his family, he was able to serve as spiritual counselor to the village women. My friend looked at me strangely. "They put their problems to him through their husbands, of course," he said. "But what if their husband is their problem?" That possibility hadn't crossed either man's mind.

It was only then that I realized the distance between uncle and nephew wasn't nearly as great as I'd assumed.

How little we know, I thought, of the people we live amongst. It is not as if, had you asked me, I would have claimed to fathom the thoughts and sentiments of two whose station in life was so far distant from mine. But in my own unexamined way I had believed that, working in their house and seeing to their needs, watching their comings and goings and their dealings with others, I had come to know them. How little, how very little, that knowledge had really amounted to.

It's so easy for people like me"—a diplomat's son raised abroad and educated in America—"to be totally off base about this country and what it is ready to accept.

There was something in her that could not, or would not, see the distinctions that the world wished to make between weak and strong, between women and men, laborer and lord.

These artists you propose to study, these"—she paused and dropped her voice—"White males. They are not so intéressant, I think. Not so important.

What really is at stake? The subjects are Black, the painters White, yet you want to argue against objectification in this case?

Fear took each of us differently.

We have grown older together, trapped in the aspic of our age gap.

I have lived most of my life in soldiers' camps. I know what they saw. I know how they think. Their confidence sours as sudden as curdled milk.

I like people. I like watching them. It's just I'd prefer to do it from a mile away using very poweful binoculars.

The richer you are, I've worked out, the smaller your telephone and the bigger your telephoto lens.

The gods never meant you to live forever, so why spoil they life they did give you? Is a rainbow any less beautiful because it's short-lived? Or because you can't grasp hold of it? Consider, man. Perhaps it is beautiful expressly because of that.

Children want to be strong, secure, and happy. Their fantasies will tell us what they feel they need to attain that, if we pay attention. But we need to look beyond our adult expectations and interpretations and see them through our children's eyes. First, we need to begin disentangling the fears and preconceptions that have prevented us from doing so.

Beauty is a relation, and the apprehension of it a comparison.

If you look in the mirror and don't like what you see, you can find out first hand what it's like to be me.

Anything can be art. Anthing can be self-expression. Now you take the weapon and run with it.

Being happy doesn't mean that everything is perfect. It means that you've decided to look beyond the imperfections.

I was fortunate to have had a happy childhood, one that in all probability was not as perfect as I have chosen to remember. But its memory has helped me survive, and I have used it as a beacon to illuminate the darkness of the tragedy that followed, just as I often use the darkness of past despair to show me the blessings which I might otherwise take for granted.

Love is the whole history of a woman's life, it is but an episode in a man's.

some claim that one is only ever really in love once in a lifetime, others that it is better the second time around, others that the first time is the only genuine manifestation, still others that they fall in love every week or even every day.

Old people see best in the distance.