Quotes About Perspective

Life serves up satire. Unfortunately. Or fortunately. I don't know. You have to reel it in to drama.

Unfortunately, the Egyptians weren't the greatest artists in the world.

My only concern is that the L.A. Times opinion pages, unfortunately like too many in this country, are dominated by men, and I'd like to see that change.

In Uganda, I am surrounded, unfortunately, by evangelicals; I can't bear it. Every night I hear the chants of Baptists urging people to be born again.

Unfortunately, I was making comedies in my 20s, but other people didn't realize they were comedies.

When you're female working in a male-dominated industry, there are unfortunately extra things you need to do - for example, couch opinions in a way that sounds palatable and not threatening. That's a skill I developed.

Unfortunately, we have a tendency to see figures from the past as caricatures - either all good or all bad - when the truth is always much more complex.

Peace is a very poor aspiration. Unfortunately, even so-call spiritual leaders are going about saying that the ultimate goal of life is to find peace. Peace is a fundamental requirement. Why are you making it as the last thing in your life? It must be the first thing that happens to you.

Unfortunately, I am not the typical, old-school, 'Yes dear, you're right,' just to get out of a situation. I am more of the type to work it out until you think I'm right or I think you're right.

A severe though not unfriendly critic of our institutions said that the cure for admiring the House of Lords was to go and look at it.

I don't think that Americans are ungrateful, not at all. But I do think that we are a young country, and we have a lot to learn.

Humor does not rescue us from unhappiness, but enables us to move back from it a little.

I don't have any gnawing guilt over contributing to any unhappiness suffered by my husbands. They were as much to blame as I was.

I generally find that comparison is the fast track to unhappiness. No one ever compares themselves to someone else and comes out even. Nine times out of ten, we compare ourselves to people who are somehow better than us and end up feeling more inadequate.

What joy can the years bring half so sweet as the unhappiness they've taken away?

Friends have suggested that I am the least qualified person to talk about happiness, because I am often down, and sometimes profoundly depressed. But I think that's where my qualification comes from. Because to know happiness, it helps to know unhappiness.

I realised that to compare your insides with other people's outsides leads to unhappiness.

At times, I've been incapacitated by anxiety and unhappiness. You really know what joy is if you have experienced the opposite.

I've been fortunate in that I never actually read any Jane Austen until I was thirty, thus sparing myself several decades of the unhappiness of having no new Jane Austen novels to read.

Toledo is better than exciting, it's happy. Because nothing is more conducive to unhappiness than taking yourself seriously, and taking yourself seriously is difficult when you're baseball team is the Mud Hens.

The unhappy derive comfort from the misfortunes of others.

Complaining not only ruins everybody else's day, it ruins the complainer's day, too. The more we complain, the more unhappy we get.

If you optimize everything, you will always be unhappy.

The more I expect, the more unhappy I am going to be. The more I accept, the more serene I am.