Quotes About Perspective

it scarce hath been heard there were ever two men that dreamed alike

If I do not believe as you believe, it proves that you do not believe as I believe, and that is all that it proves.

Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.

He prays dictatorially. When it is sunshine, he prays for rain, and when it is rain, he prays for sunshine. He follows the same idea in everything that he prays for; for what is the amount of all his prayers, but an attempt to make the Almighty change his mind, and act otherwise than he does? It is as if he were to say—- thou knowest not so well as I.

That which we obtain too easily, we esteem lightly.

I have furnished myself with a Bible and Testament; and I can say also that I have found them to be much worse books than I had conceived. If I have erred in any thing, in the former part of the Age of Reason, it has been by speaking better of some parts than they deserved.

if every one is left to judge of his own religion, there is no such thing as a religion that is wrong; but if they are to judge of each other's religion, there is no such thing as a religion that is right; and therefore all the world is right, or all the world is wrong.

No man is prejudiced in favor of a thing, knowing it to be wrong. He is attached to it on the belief of its being right; and when he sees it is not so, the prejudice will be gone.

You were not contented while you had her, and to weep for her now is childish.

Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication—after this, it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner; for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.

Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible7 is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my own part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.

Instead of this, a small number of persons, not more than eight or nine, are introduced as proxies for the whole world, to say they saw it, and all the rest of the world are called upon to believe it.

That which we obtain too easily we esteem too lightly.

When you're dead, the way death got you is just one thing that happened among thousands. You don't care more about that day than any of the others, just because it was the last day. You'll see.

He liked her stories for the same reason she told them—they should have happened.

They sent her to the fourteenth floor, which Elle knew was always the thirteenth mislabeled for the people whose idea of the borderline between reality and nonsense was flexible.

She didn't have enough patience to try to explain to Christine the proper way to think about money. Among the old people, a person's status had never been determined by how much wealth he could accumulate, but how much he brought back to give away.

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.

Why should things be easy to understand?

It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads.

Our own attitudes always seem OK because we use an attitude to judge itself. No matter how much misery our attitudes cause, we will always defend them.

Therefore, any human concern that has only to do with this world, no matter how global, no matter how painful, no matter how enduring — ?if it has only to do with this world — compares to the importance of saving faith as a thimble to the ocean.

We believe with all our hearts that it is possible to disagree passionately with people, even to see their views as wrong and harmful, and still love them.

Rhetoric accomplishes its work by inducing us to shift, at least potentially, how we dwell or see ourselves dwelling in the world.