Quotes About Perspective

Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If cavemen had known how to laugh, history would have been different.

Who Am I? Or (Perhaps More Accurately) Who Else Could Be Me?

Sometimes I think children are the worst people alive. And even if they're not—even if some smiling toddler is as pure as Evian—it's only a matter of time.

If you stare long enough at anything, you will start to find similarities. The word "coincidence" exists in order to stop people from seeing meaning where none exists.

This is what being alive feels like, you know? The place doesn't matter. You just live.

The deeper reality is that I'm not sure if what I do is real. I usually believe that I'm certain about how I feel, but that seems naive. How do we know how we feel?…There is almost certainly a constructed schism between (a) how I feel, and (b) how I think I feel. There's probably a third level, too—how I want to think I feel.

Do you understand? Do you see the forest through the trees? Do you not see what I am no longer not saying to you? If so—congratulations! Prepare to have sex constantly.

Even though I wanted to experience all these things I was interested in, I couldn't get them. So I had to think critically and culturally about what was available.

We're all tourists, sort of. Life is tourism, sort of. As far as I'm concerned, the dinosaurs still hold the lease on this godforsaken rock.

Maybe I don't need a relationship after all, she thought. Maybe thinking about these conversations was just as good as having them. She could sit in her Honda in the dark and experience whatever kind of life she wanted. Sometimes you think, Hey, maybe there's something else out there. But there really isn't. This is what being alive feels like, you know? The place doesn't matter. You just live.

The only people who think the Internet is a calamity are people whose lives have been hurt by it; the only people who insist the Internet is wonderful are those who need it to give their life meaning.

The year you spent 'killing yourself' to make me love you…I thought that was us being best friends. We had all those intimate conversations and you sent me all those long e-mails and we watched all those movies involving Eric Stoltz—I thought that was us having fun. But you see that kind of behavior as the work you're forced to do in order to sleep with the people you want to sleep with.

History is a creative process (or as Napoleon Bonaparte once said, "a set of lies agreed upon"). The world happens as it happens, but we construct what we remember and what we forget. And people will eventually do that to us, too.

there's no such thing as middle-class. The middle class does not exist. If you believe you are part of the middle class, it just means you're rich and insecure or poor and misinformed.

But this is how popular culture works: You allow yourself to be convinced you're sharing a reality that doesn't exist.

We spend our lives learning many things, only to discover (again and again) that most of what we've learned is either wrong or irrelevant. A big part of our mind can handle this; a smaller, deeper part cannot. And it's that smaller part that matters more, because that part of our mind is who we really are (whether we like it or not).

And this, of course, is the central problem with conspiracy theorists — once you inflexibly accept that something is a conspiracy, any contrary evidence has the paradoxical effect of making your case stronger. Every contradiction deepens the conspiracy.

The reason so many well-considered ideas appear laughable in retrospect is that people involuntarily assume that whatever we believe and prioritize now will continue to be believed and prioritized later, even though that almost never happens. It's a mistake that never stops being made.

We were just old enough to be warped by childhood and just young enough not to realize it.

And all I could do while I listened to this dude tell me how punk rock saved his life was think, Wow. Why did my friend waste all that time going to chemotherapy? I guess we should have just played him a bunch of shitty Black Flag records.

We must start from the premise that—in all likelihood—we are already wrong. And not "wrong" in the sense that we are examining questions and coming to incorrect conclusions, because most of our conclusions are reasoned and coherent. The problem is with the questions themselves.

Nothing can be appreciated in a vacuum.

Every time period that's ever transpired has seemed unprecedented to the people who happened to live through it; no one has ever believed the Chinese aphorism 'May you live in interesting times' did not apply to the life they were coincidentally living.

I think the larger sect of liars are people who think they are telling the truth, but who really have no idea what the truth is.