Quotes About Perspective

And I bet it's harder than people think, isn't it? Everything looks so simple from a distance. Then, the more you look, the more you see. And that's when you have to rise to the challenge.

Use death as your advisor, and you'll start making better decisions about your life,

Supe que contemplaba el mundo desde su cumbre más alta. Al fondo, muy bajo, se extendía, en un océano inmenso de puntos titilantes, el plano completo de las luces de la ciudad...

toda historia es como un gran pastel, cada quién da cuenta de la tajada que se come y el único que da cuenta de todo es el pastelero.

Toda gran historia es como un gran pastel, cada quién da cuenta de la tajada que se come y él único que da cuenta de todo es el pastelero.

We live on the circumference of a hollow circle. We draw the circumference, like spiders, out of ourselves: it is all criticism of criticism.

According to my mother, no book is only a book. A book can improve your mind or it can break it.

Hell is never what you think it's going to be" -Guardian

They were better, even angry Honorata. Roza could have been any of them, every one of them. The story hadn't changed. Only the costumes. Only the players.

They think they're the only ones who understand the real truth about the world, and that it's everyone else who's been tricked. . . . The biggest problem we have is that people like to fool themselves into thinking that they could never be fooled.

Who are you today?" her mom asked. "Isn't it obvious?" "Not to anyone over the age of seven." "I'm a ballerina-spy-deathmetalhead." "Lovely," said her mother.

Everything felt both huge and small, as if the plane were hanging from a string held by the hands of gods.

Now that you mention it, I was chatting with the crows earlier. They were wondering why you guys walk like you're wearing diapers.

But wasn't that love? Seeing what no one else could? And yet if it wasn't enough for her that she was beautiful to him, if she couldn't believe him . . .

The key to this is realizing that life isn't lived in epiphanies, and that looking for lessons and the necessity of big life changes in dark moments profoundly limits our lives.

If you do have a job you like, if you're happy in life, you don't need those materialistic things to make you happy," he says.

If a negative state is assumed in life, then you have to call attention to its absence.

autobiographical narrative running through our brains, is really three selves. There is the "anticipating self," who looked forward to that ice skating trip, the "experiencing self," who would do it, and the "remembering self" (a concept Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman popularized in his research), who would look back fondly on the memory of those kids zipping around on the ice.

This is all true, and yet not really an argument against ownership. It is easy to believe our own excuses, particularly if they're good ones, but in a world of 7 billion people, there is always someone facing Y who is doing X. All of us have to assess the plot of life we are allotted every twenty-four hours and figure out how we can make the most of what we've been given.

If you take nothing else from this book, I hope you remember this: Success is possible, even in the midst of a complex and occasionally chaotic life. You do not need to wait for some less-hectic future time to become the person you want to be. With a different perspective, and a focus on doing what you can, you can be that person now.

We do the things we have to—sleep, work, feed the children—and don't make time for the things we want to do. Or we don't appreciate how well we are doing, and so we feel squeezed and claustrophobic in our own lives.

This conscious decision to hunt for the positive can help combat the common tendency to focus on dark moments, the sort that lead us to stormy conclusions about whether life with a big career and a family is doable. Sometimes things look bleak, but life is not all black-and-white.

requires changing the narrative. As Daytner explained to me, she doesn't tell herself I don't have time to do X, Y, or Z. She tells herself that she won't do X, Y, or Z because "it's not a priority.

Laura Vanderkam