Quotes About Perspective

Part of the complexity of living through history is the process of explaining things about the past that you never explained to yourself. So many temporary realties, distantly viewed in the rearview mirror, will appear ridiculous to any person who wasn't there.

I have a colleague who feels anyone over the age of twenty-one caught reading a Harry Potter novel should be executed without trial, but that strikes me as unreasonable; the fact that they're written for British thirteen-year-olds probably means they're the right speed for 90 percent of American adults.

Now, obviously, all old people seem cool whenever we see black-and-white images of their younger selves. It's human nature to inject every old picture with positive abstractions. We can't help ourselves. We all do it. We want those things to be true, because we all hope future generations will have the same thoughts when they come across forgotten photographs of us.

People who are wrong during particularly important moments inevitably spend the rest of their lives trying to explain how their wrongness was paradoxically correct, or—at the very least—why their wrongness "felt right at the time," which is very, very different from being authentically correct.

In Western culture, virtually everything is understood through the process of storytelling, often to the detriment of reality. When we recount history, we tend to use the life experience of one person — the "journey" of a particular "hero," in the lingo of the mythologist Joseph Campbell — as a prism for understanding everything else.

The mere recognition of an extrinsic reality damages the intrinsic merits of one's own reality. In other words, it's a mistake to (consciously) do what everyone else is doing, just as it's a mistake to (consciously) do the opposite.

Tricks Aren't Illusions

It was a version of nothing so close to something it accidentally became everything.

If you aspire to be truly open-minded, you can't just try to see the other side of an argument. That's not enough. You have to go all the way.

And I'm probably wrong. Maybe not completely, but partially. And maybe not today, but eventually.

This conclusion invented a political perspective that's become omnipresent in any two-person race but still felt original in 2000: Again and again, Bush was described as the candidate voters 'would rather have a beer with.' It was a very nineties way to think about a problem.

I'm sure I could have read the entire four-thousand-page plot summarized in four hundred words on Wikipedia, or I could simply walk into any high school and ask a few questions of the first kid I find who isn't smoking crystal meth.

People will look at the world without seeing anything beyond their unconscious expectation.

What Tarantino could express, more explicitly than any of his peers, was the intensity of his own perspective.

If you aspire to be truly open-minded, you can't just try to see the other side of an argument. That's not enough. You have to go all the way. Over

History is defined by people who don't really understand what they are defining

It's someone who views life as a game where the rules are poorly written and designed for abuse.

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.

It's difficult to cope with the infinite variety of the past, and so we apply filters and settle on a few famous names.

The compulsion to reconsider the past through the ideals and beliefs of the present is constant and overwhelming. It allows for a sense of moral clarity and feels more enlightened. But it's actually just easier than trying to understand how things felt when they originally occurred.

I sometimes think I should have titled this book 'Aristotle: The Genius Who Was Wrong About Fucking Everything'.

No one has ever honestly said, "I hate that this joke exists, even though it's clearly hilarious." It

If we objectively balance the good things Ali did against the bad, there's no question he's ultimately heroic. But that's not the issue. The issue is that these kinds of questions are never weighed objectively. That's not how the court of public opinion operates.

I don't need to personally agree with something in order to recognize that it's true.