Quotes About Perspective

one must take into account the shocking fact that we live on a world that spins. After considering this truth, nothing should come as a surprise.

It's strange how you're sometimes forced to assume an unsympathetic view of yourself through borrowed eyes.

As we should know by now, it is as easy to make fun of religious or scientific visionaries as it is to idolize them. Which attitude is adopted depends on whether or not they tell you what you want to hear.

If you can't say something positive about humanity, then say something equivocal.

at any given time there are more cannibals than philosophical pessimists.

From where we stand, immortality and death are synonymous: a two-headed monster of semantics. Having no value for us except as "endness," they generate value backwards into life.

Renowned for stating his convictions in the form of a paradox, as above, Chesterton, along with anyone who has something positive or equivocal to say about the human race, comes out on top in the crusade for truth. (There is nothing paradoxical about that.) Therefore, should your truth run counter to that of individuals who devise or applaud paradoxes that stiff up the status quo, you would be well advised to take your arguments, tear them up, and throw them in someone else's garbage.

If you interrupted them in the middle of an ecstatic moment, which pessimists do have, and asked if existence is basically undesirable, they would reply "Of course" before returning to their ecstasy. Why they should answer in this way is a closed book.

Whether you think consciousness to be a benefit or a horror, this is only what you think—and nothing else.

Optimists may have fugitive doubts about the basic desirability of existence, but pessimists never doubt that existence is basically undesirable. If you interrupted them in the middle of an ecstatic moment, which pessimists do have, and asked if existence is basically undesirable, they would reply "Of course" before returning to their ecstasy.

When you're on your last legs, whether you're confined to a bed or screaming in a crashed-up car, many things may occur to you. Something that won't occur to you, either confined to a bed or screaming, is that it doesn't matter what you did or didn't do during your existence.

Whether you think consciousness to be a benefit or a horror, this is only what you think—and nothing else. But even though you cannot demonstrate the truth of what you think, you can at least put it on show and see what the audience thinks.

it is as easy to make fun of religious or scientific visionaries as it is to idolize them. Which attitude is adopted depends on whether or not they tell you what you want to hear.

No poem ever bought a hamburger, or not too many.

The voice you hear when you read to yourself is the clearest voice: you speak it speaking to you.

I had this theory. It was based loosely on the unremarkable observation that the old are always looking back with longing while the young, with the same longing, look ahead. One man remembers what the other imagines.

The realization that God could be female required the consideration that the Devil could be also.

The living have to live with it. You don't. Theirs is the grief or the gladness of your death, theirs is the loss or gain of it. Theirs is the pain and the pleasure of memory.

Watching my parents, I watched the meaning change, of what it was that undertakers do: From something done with the dead, to something done for the living, to something done by the living—everyone of us.

the difficulty was in training the eye to see the whole world of usual forms -- patterns of brick, painted plaster, carved and carpentered wood -- not as "buildings" and "streets" but as an infinite series of free and arbitrary choices. There was no place in such a scheme for orders, styles, sophistication, taste. ("The Asian Shore")

Gender and the complications it gives rise to simply aren't relevant to the lives appliances lead.

Creativeness is the ability to see relationships where none exist.

We are supposed to "agree to disagree," a phrase now used indiscriminately as little more than a conversational fire extinguisher. And if we insist that not everything is a matter of opinion, that some things are right and others are wrong … well, then we're just being jerks, apparently. It

Public debate over almost everything devolves into trench warfare, in which the most important goal is to establish that the other person is wrong.