Quotes About Perspective

The great mass of people do not extract ten per cent, of the happiness possible in their everyday life, largely because they were never trained to think of the normal sources of enjoyment. Their minds are blank, except for the little grooves which their daily routine has stamped in their brain tissue.

and if a straw can tickle a man, it is an instrument of happiness.

Old age is the only disease you dont want to be cured of.

I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one.

We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.

I'm putting you in Dink Meeker's toon. From now on, as far as you're concerned, Dink Meeker is God. Then who are you? The personnel officer who hired God.

All the stories are fictions. What matters is which fiction you believe.

Being young is an 18 year prison sentence for a crime your parents committed. But you do get time off for good behavior.

The difference between raman and varelse is not in the creature judged, but in the creature judging. When we declare an alien species to be raman, it does not mean that they have passed a threshold of moral maturity. It means that we have.

The old tale of Sleeping Beauty might end happily in French or English, but he was in Russia, and only a fool would want to live through the Russian version of any fairy tale.

Human: That's stupid. Isn't there grass on both sides?

Quim, she said, don't ever try to teach me about good and evil. I've been there, and you've seen nothing but a map.

People above you, they never want to share power with you. Why you look to them? They give you nothing. People below you, you give them hope, you give them respect, they give you power, cause they don't think they have any, so they don't mind giving it up.

When you hear a true story, there is a part of you that responds to it regardless of art, regardless of evidence. Let it be the most obvious fabrication and you will still believe whatever truth is in it, because you can not deny truth no matter how shabbily it is dressed.

You understand that the piggies are animals, and you no more condemn them for murdering Libo and Pipo than you condemn a cabra for shewing up capim. That's right, said Miro. Ender smiled. And that's why you'll never learn anything from them. Because you think of them as animals.

You who speak languages, you are such liars.

Oh, Val, said Father. All you have to do is live your life, and everyone around you will be happier. No greatness, then. Val, said Mother, goodness trumps greatness any day. Not in the history books, said Valentine. Then the wrong people are writing history, aren't they? said Father.

I've got a pretty good idea what children are, and we're not children. Children can lose sometimes, and nobody cares.

Sometimes happiness consists of finding the right balance of misery.

You can't rule out the impossible, because you never know which of your assumptions about what was possible might turn out, in the real universe, to be false.

You frighten me, when you say there isn't time. I don't see why. Christians have been expecting the imminent end of the world for millennia. But it keeps not ending. So far, so good.

For the first time in his life, a teacher was pointing out things that Ender had not already seen for himself. For the first time, Ender had found a living mind he could admire.

Two sides of the same coin, but which side is which?

The trouble with coins is, when one face is up, the other face is down.