Quotes About Perspective

the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral

I can't not find humor in elements of most parts of life, but at the same time nothing ever seems perpetually funny to me.

We must not be satisfied to present Christianity as the most reliable position to hold among the competing options available. Rather, the Christian faith is the only reasonable outlook available to men.

When someone's paradigm changes, the world itself changes with it. So "facts" are only facts *for a system* or paradigm.

There are no facts or uses of reason which are available outside of the interpretive system. The argument must pit the unbeliever's system of thought as a unit against the believer's system of thought as a unit. Their overall perspectives will have to contend with each other.

I have always been intrigued by this obsession with so-called black-on-black violence, as if black-on-white violence was somehow more acceptable. And why had no one ever described what happened in Northern Ireland or in Bosnia, Kosovo, et al. with its vicious brutality as examples of white-on-white violence? There it was just violence - then why black-on-black violence?

Still, in the larger sense, in a broader sense, it's better to have lived than left, right?

That day Haji Ali taught me the most important lesson I've ever learned in my life. We Americans think you have to accomplish everything quickly. We're the country of thirty-minute power lunches and two-minute football drills...Haji Ali taught me to share three cups of tea, to slow down and make building relationships as important as building projects. He taught me that I had more to learn from the people I work with than I could ever hope to teach them.

The tune was too ingrained for Mortenson to consider the novelty of this moment- an American, lost in Pakistan, singing a German hymn in Swahili.

I don't want to teach Pakistani's children to think like Americans...I just want them to have a balanced, non-extremist education

When you take the time to actually listen, with humility, to what people have to say, it's amazing what you can learn. Especially if the people who are doing the talking also happen to be children.

Haji Ali taught me the most important lesson I've ever learned in my life...We Americans think you have to accomplish everything quickly. We're the country of thirty-minute power lunches and two-minute football drills. Haji Ali taught me to share three cups of tea, to slow down and make building relationships as important as building projects.

hope resides in the future, while perspective and wisdom are almost always found by looking to the past.

Pastor Bill Hybels says that seekers might look at our lives and ask themselves, "If I become a Christian, am I trading up or trading down?

Where you see darkness, I see stars . - Laech Min-Glsain, from Poems, Prayers and Meditations on the Force, edited by Kozem Pel, Disciple of the Whills

It has nothing to do with rough or gentle. Privileged or broke, everyone has their own path to the light. Sometimes those of us who came up hard are forced to see what actually matters. If we survive, that is. The world doesn't allow us not to see. We are forced into understanding, into grace. It's either that or prison, or drugs, or the cold, hard earth.

Every time I consider myself an adult, I think back five years to when I also thought of myself as an adult. An I'm aghast at how staggeringly blind I was. Maybe what I hold to be true right now will seem just as ignorant when I reflect back on it years from now.

Don't surround yourself with like-minded people. You'll get limited or radicalized.

Fear needs a future," Evan said. "Let's focus on the present.

If all of the dos and don'ts of quantum possibilities are true and emotion is the key to choosing reality, then the question is: "How do we feel as if something has happened when the person next to us stares us squarely in the face and says that it hasn't?

If everything we do and create is done to the best of our ability, then until we compare it to something else, how can it be anything less than great?

Key 7: The focus of our awareness becomes the reality of our world.

implications are mind-boggling.

To heal the ancient battle between darkness and light, we may find that it's less about defeating one or the other, and more about choosing our relationship to both.