Quotes About Perspective

Our ignorance of history makes us libel to our own times. People have always been like this.

Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.

There is no truth. There is only perception.

From the intellectual point of view an abyss may exist between a great mathematician and his boot maker, but from the point of view of character the difference is most often slight or non-existent

Jede Folgerung, die wir aus unseren Beobachtungen ziehen, ist meistens voreilig: Denn hinter den wahrgenommenen Erscheinungen gibt es solche, die wir undeutlich sehen, und hinter diesen wahrscheinlich noch andere, die wir überhaupt nicht erkennen.

There is a style of life that gives a distinctive personality to one manner of being a Christian. This manner is in fact a limited manner, for no spirituality can claim to be the way to be a Christian. It is simply one way among others.

He looked out of the window to think, because without a window he couldn't think. Or maybe it was the other way around: When there was a window, he automatically started to think. Then he wrote, "When I grow up, I am going to be happy.

He looked out of the window to think, because without a window he couldn't think. Or Maybe it was the other way round: where there was a window, he automatically started to think. Then he wrote, 'When I grow up, I am going to be happy.

Looked at from the vantage points offered by fictional stories, slavery, like the glass viewed from above, at first glance, can appear to be merely trivial, two-dimensional, erotic behavior that is not deserving of any serious attention.

Life is bloody short, and you might as well concentrate on enjoying yourself because nobody is going to admire you for your sacrifices and self-restraint.

I've decided that all women are basically miserable. The single ones are miserable because they haven't found a husband, and the married ones are miserable because they have found a husband.

Only four years ago they had presumably been carefree, single girls laughing in a disco and now, as if hardened by some battle, they were assertive, humourless creatures he would not care to live with.

A Jesuit and a Franciscan are walking through a garden, silently engaged in prayer, when the Jesuit pulls out and lights up a big cigar. The Franciscan whispers, "My spiritual director says one should not smoke while one prays." The Jesuit replies, "Mine said it's all right if I pray while I smoke.")

Bonnie Jean (who thinks all philosophers are idiots) has this quarrel with Wittgenstein, who in several places says that reddish green is inconceivable. Yet every summer, when our peppers are drying from green to red, one can see an intermediate stage that is precisely reddish green.

Life is a slope. As long as you're going up you're always looking towards the top and you feel happy, but when you reach it, suddenly you can see the road going downhill and death at the end of it all. It's slow going up and quick going down.

There is nothing more natural than to consider everything as starting from oneself, chosen as the center of the world; one finds oneself thus capable of condemning the world without even wanting to hear its deceitful chatter.

And I certainly wouldn't demonize an entire people on the basis of 3 blurry photos and a few paintings

In fact, they live in a state of constant paradox where truth is anything but constant

Pour que vous parveniez à bien nous comprendre, il vous faudrait vivre longtemps , entourées de Noirs, en Afrique, et loin des Blancs dont la civilisation trop poussée finit par tout détruire !

Noam Chomsky has famously argued that a Martian scientist would conclude that all earthlings speak dialects of the same language.

The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, king of Spain, archduke of Austria, and master of several European tongues, professed to speaking "Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.

The new anthropology required each culture to be understood on its own terms, as a product of its own evolution rather than as merely an earlier stage in the ascent toward Western civilization.

Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.

But from a purely linguistic perspective, and as a rule of thumb, when two varieties of what used to be the same language are no longer mutually intelligible, they can be called different languages.