Quotes About Perspective

Often an ounce of humor is worth a ton of words.

Do not insult the mother alligator until after you have crossed the river.

Audite et alteram partem

Being from Africa is the best thing that could have ever, ever happened to me. I cannot see it any other way. All of my fundamental principles that were instilled in me in my home, from my childhood, are still with me.

Reality is not the same to the doer as it is to the sayer

I maintain that (as usual) many sides exist to this issue rather than only two. Two-sided issues (creationism vs darwinism, "choice" vs "pro-life," etc.) are all without exception delusions , spectacular lies.

Breakthrough solutions start with reframed questions, and we are in need of breakthrough solutions in many, many realms.

approach these questions with a "beginner's mind" - constantly seeing the world with fresh eyes

Having formed a hypothesis that something is true about the world, we are more apt to note and file away evidence that helps to confirm that while passing over the evidence around us that would suggest otherwise.

Kids growing up in today's generation are constantly documenting their experience. It's different—how does that change their sense of self when everything becomes a story that you are telling?

The more we have and the easier life is, the more we take things for granted. Then we start sniveling as soon as things are less than perfect.

Why waste your time and energy looking for the negative, finding it, and then bringing other people down by talking about it all the time? Doesn't it make a lot more sense to look for the good, find the good, and then celebrate it with others?

The professor, a wise and kind Jesuit, said, "An open mind is an attitude. It means you don't think you already know everything.

Only when we accept the fact that the world is never exactly as we see it through our individual lens of perception will we be able to accept ourselves or the mystery that is life itself.

The best advice my dad ever gave me is that acting is believing. Acting is not acting. It isn't putting on a face and dancing around in a mask. It's believing that you are that character and playing him as if it were a normal day in the life of that character.

Many years ago Rudyard Kipling gave an address at McGill University in Montreal. He said one striking thing which deserves to be remembered. Warning the students against an over-concern for money, or position, or glory, he said: "Some day you will meet a man who cares for none of these things. Then you will know how poor you are."

Remember, any lie you are told, even deliberately, is often a more significant fact than a truth told in all sincerity.

When you grow up in that (multi-ethnic) environment, you see the world differently. Being a mixed-race child, I didn't always see colour in people, I really didn't. It was other people that made me see the colour all the time.

It feels kind of cool to come back from work every day without having killed anybody.

Don't you want to tell the story yourself?' I asked my father one snowy, bright autumn Sunday. 'Ach. Who wants to hear a leaf tell the story of the wind?

The privilege isn't given to everyone.… You must have suffered first, have suffered greatly, have gained some miserable knowledge. In that way your eyes are opened to it. —Henry James, 1881

Jason you can't control the universe and everything that happens in it, but you can control your reaction to it. You can control you, and how you choose to live each day.

All poets and story tellers alive today make a single brotherhood; they are engaged in a single work, picturing our human life. Whoever pictures life as he sees it, reassembles in his own way the details of existence which affect him deeply, and so creates a spiritual world of his own.

How disturbing it is that our illusions are often our most important beliefs.