Quotes About Perspective

I think you can't possibly know the truth about somebody unless you love them.

So the whole war is because we can't talk to each other.' 'If the other fellow can't tell you his story, you can never be sure he isn't trying to kill you.

I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one. Or at least as close as we're going to get.

it's so easy, when you never meet people, when you never know the Earth itself... it's easy to forget why Earth is worth saving. Why the world of people might be worth the price you pay.

You're like, both like, Alexander the Great.' We can't both be Alexander.' Well sometimes I think you're two side of the same coin, and I'm the metal in between.

The child is mine and Petra's. It's especially important to us because it's the first we know of that definitely does not have my condition. You mean it isn't ugly?

You don't want to give God the credit because you don't think he exists. But if you're going to blame him for all the crap, kid, you got to give him credit for what grows from that fertilized soil.

I speak to everyone in the language they understand, said Ender. That isn't being slick. It's being clear

The Earth is deep, and right to the heart it's alive. We people only live on the top, like the bugs that live on the scum of the still water near the shore.

Perhaps every writer who thoroughly creates a fictional world will inevitably create a mirror of his own time and yet also create a world that no one else but him has ever visited...

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.

Today, one of the brothers asked me: Is it a terrible prison, not to be able to move from the place where you're standing? You answered... I told him that I am now more free than he is. The inability to move frees me from the obligation to act. You who speak languages, you are such liars.

The humans build their stupid fence to keep us out, but that is nothing. The sky is our fence!" Human leapt upward—startlingly high, for his legs were powerful. "Look how the fence throws me back down to the ground!

To a man with only a hammer, a screw is a defective nail.

Just because your former understanding of the purpose of your life is contradicted doesn't mean that you have to decide there is no purpose.

It was even before he left Earth that he first thought of it as a planet, like any other, not particularly his own.

Sophisticated people seem to think that the truth must always be dark, disappointing, disillusioning. But this is not so at all. Most of the time, darkness, disappointment, and disillusionment are the illusion. Truth is neutral. Our decisions determine what darkens and what lightens our lives.

In the end it was only Peter who had something he could say from the heart. Am I the only one here who sees something of himself in the man who's lying inside this box? No one had an answer for him, either yes or no.

Once you understand what people really want, you can't hate them anymore. You can fear them, but you can't hate them, because you can always find the same desires in your own heart.

This is all so silly,' said Diko. 'Who cares about what's real and what isn't real? [...] And as for our own history, the parts that will be lost, who cares if a mathematician calls us dirty names like unreal? They say such slanders about the square root of minus two as well.

Is the future, is the past, all that matters to you? Don't you have just a little bit of room for the present?

Why should I worry about uncreating so much of human history? Why should I care that it will be worse than forgotten, that it will be unknown? Why should that seem to be a crime, when all of human history is an eyeblink compared to the billions of years the stars have shone?

Everyone was always in such a rush to shoot forward that they never took the time to look back. Which was a mistake. If you wanted to avoid snags, kinks, knots, and cuts, you had to keep your mind on your line, as the saying went.

Maybe it isn't based on what you deserve. Maybe it's based on what you need.