Quotes About Perspective

Wishful thinking is not idealism. It is self-indulgence at best and self-exaltation at worst. In either case, it is usually at the expense of others. In other words, it is the opposite of idealism.

Too much of what is called 'education' is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.

Masturbation: the primary sexual activity of mankind. In the nineteenth century it was a disease; in the twentieth, it's a cure.

Happiness is... usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.

When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him..

Why don't you have a right to say you are Jesus? And why isn't the proper response to that "congratulations"?

A child becomes an adult when he realizes that he has a right not only to be right but also to be wrong.

After half a day in a place—especially a foreign country—you've learned more than from all the books and articles you've read.

There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography.

The battle for the world is the battle for definitions.

It would take me thirty years to learn the psychological advantages of letting people use a mildly embarrassing nickname. It lets them think they own a piece of you, and that binds them to you.

The difference between the two kinds of death, in other words, is essentially a difference of perspective. From the perspective of those already crucified in Christ, the destruction of the false self is clearly a good thing; it is liberation or salvation itself. But from the perspective of those who continue to cling to the false self, its destruction will be a fearsome thing; it will seem like the very destruction of themselves.

For nothing works greater mischief in theology, I am persuaded, than a simple failure of the imagination, the inability to put things together in imaginative ways.

Happiness was not made to be boasted, but enjoyed. Therefore tho others count me miserable, I will not believe them if I know and feel myself to be happy; nor fear them.

Some things are little on the outside, and rough and common, but I remember the time when the dust of the streets were as pleasing as Gold to my infant eyes, and now they are more precious to the eye of reason.

For there is a disease in him who despiseth present mercies, which till it be cured, he can never be happy. He esteemeth nothing that he hath, but is ever gaping after more: which when he hath he despiseth in like manner.

in the true order everything is seen from within.

Whatever we believe does, for us, in very fact exist. Our beliefs may be erroneous from the point of view of a happier belief, but this does not alter the fact that for ourselves our beliefs are our realities, and these realities must continue until some ground is found for a change in belief.

According to your faith be it unto you

She seemed less my wife and more a woman in her own right, more self-reliant and independent. I felt I was looking at her in the round, so to speak, as one views a statue, from all sides, not merely a bas-relief with the figure partially imprisoned in the stone.

Originality is simply a pair of fresh eyes.

The history written, taught, and sworn to as 'the unvarnished truth' by the establishment—any establishment, left or right, conservative or liberal, capitalist or socialist or fascist—is generally revisionist, narrow in perspective, monolithic, and agenda-driven. In the worst case, it consists of one part denial and one part propaganda—in other words, a self-serving pack of lies.

When the impossible is eliminated, whatever remains, however improbable, is the solution ... unless you're mistaken as to just what is and what isn't impossible.

In your country," a young Saudi doctor told him "you protect the rights of the individual at the expense of society." In Saudi Arabia, Seymour Gray concluded, it is the other way around.