Quotes About Perspective

"Happily ever after" depends on where we choose to end the story.

Like steam from a cup of hot tea that fogs our glasses, false urgency of matters at hand blurs our vision to important things in the distance.

If your teeth are clenched and your fists are clenched, your lifespan is probably clenched.

Is everything as urgent as your stress would imply?

You ever take a nap so good that you thought you missed the school bus. But it's Sunday… and you're 32.

The outsider may indeed wonder at this seeming much ado about nothing. What a tempest in a tea-cup! he will say. But when we consider how small after all the cup of human enjoyment is, how soon overflowed with tears, how easily drained to the dregs in our quenchless thirst for infinity, we shall not blame ourselves for making so much of the tea-cup.

Tea elevates our minds so that we can see our problems from a distance — through the fine mists of contemplation.

There is nothing wrong with today's teenager that twenty years won't cure.

Time has convinced me of one thing. Television is for appearing on, not looking at.

It would, said Biran, be much nearer the truth to say asservie à des organes. Man is an intelligence, not served by, but in servitude to his organs.

Life is so much clearer under the stars than under a roof.

The past is not a package one can lay away.

But a queer thing is — this is personal — however painful a thing has been when I look back it is no longer painful, or no more painful than music is. In fact it is just that.

How often we fail to realize our good fortune in living in a country where happiness is more than a lack of tragedy.

[T]his country is bigger than Wall Street, and if they don't believe it, I show 'em the map.

Do not watch too closely cogs in the wheel of time. Observe their passing as the rhythm of a poem — not clicks of the abacus.

The only way to get back to them is to go somewhere else; and that is the real object of travel and the real pleasure of holidays. Do you suppose that I go to France in order to see France? Do you suppose that I go to Germany in order to see Germany? I shall enjoy them both; but it is not them that I am seeking... The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them and see his fellows with impartial eye afar, for half his days, he is esteemed a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods, he is esteemed industrious and enterprising — making earth bald before its time.

Climb a tree — it gets you closer to heaven.

Opinion is a flitting thing But truth outlasts the sun, If then we cannot own them both, Possess the oldest one.

Every truth bends and reshapes itself or is reshaped by other forces.

Don't keep searching for the truth, just let go of your opinions.

Part of me is thinking: It's Wednesday already! And the other part of me is thinking: What do you mean it's only Wednesday?!

Nothing ruins a Friday like realizing it's only Wednesday.