Quotes About Perspective

The camera cannot lie, but it can be an accessory to untruth.

Actions are always more complex and nuanced than they seem. We have to be willing to wrestle with paradox in pursuing understanding.

Prepositional verbs grow like toadstools. Once there was credit in facing a problem. Now problems have to be faced up to. The prepositions add nothing of significance.

All the romance of trout fishing exists in the mind of the angler and is in no way shared by the fish.

Irritably, Piatt replied that "in ninety days the land would be whitened by tents." But Lincoln would not take the bait. He merely replied: "Well, we won't jump that ditch until we come to it," pausing before he added: "I must run the machine as I find it." Piatt left dinner wondering why the "strange and strangely gifted" Lincoln remained "so blind.

The author says that though the Mexican War wound down, the interpretation of it was just beginning.

A Seed for Contemplation: Creative people who cherish the gift of life often slip into the secret chambers of the creative mind. Their solutions are well-rounded, more sensible than those of people who rely solely upon reason as their mainstay. Gratitude unseals fountains of creativity, because a grateful person is relaxed. This allows him to take stock of his circumstances with an objective mind. A creative person often gets three-dimensional answers to his problems. —

The great secret of a successful marriage is to treat all disasters as incidents and none of the incidents as disasters.

There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened.

There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.

I heard my aunt and uncle come to the door. I heard her voice through the door. "Morris, I'd better go in and speak to him. Did you see the look on his face? It was as if he was a little boy locked out of his home." "No," my uncle said. "Let him alone. He'll get over it soon. He's a real man." They walked away.

You don't expect me to get on line with all them rednecks, Polacks and niggers, do you? Don't forget I was a foreman out at Chrysler.

My aunt touched my shoulder, I opened my eyes startled for a moment. She was smiling softly but I could see the tears sparkling in the corner of her eyes. "It's the same God, Frankie." I could feel the tension flow out of me. Suddenly I smiled at her. She was right: the Word meant God in no matter what language you spoke it—English, Latin or… Hebrew.

I never went to Hebrew school or to a church or synagogue afterward, but then I never gave much thought to God either. I felt confident that I would be able to deal with Him when the time came for me to have to—just as I would deal with everything else in my life, when the time came and not before.

A man is a thousand parts, All of them other people." -Harold Robbins in The Inheritors

Think of it this way: no scientist has ever seen an electron, but all scientists agree that electrons exist. No physicist has ever seen a quark, but all physicists believe that quarks are real. Why? Because when they look into their microscopes, they see things happening that could only happen if quarks and electrons existed. I believe in the reality of God the way scientists believe in the reality of electrons. I see things happening that would not happen unless there is a God.

I am not sure prayer puts us in touch with God the way many people think it does--that we approach God as a supplicant, a beggar asking for favors, or as a customer presenting Him with a shopping list and asking what it will cost. Prayer is not primarily a matter of asking God to change things. If we come to understand what prayer can and should be, and rid ourselves of some unrealistic expectations, we will be better able to call on prayer, and on God, when we need them most.

When you have been hurt by life, it may be hard to keep that in mind. When you are standing very close to a large object, all you can see is the object. Only by stepping back from it can you also see the rest of its setting around it. When we are stunned by some tragedy, we can only see and feel the tragedy. Only with time and distance can we see the tragedy in the context of a whole life and a whole world.

Perhaps that is the only cure for jealousy, to realize that the people we resent and envy for having what we lack, probably have wounds and scars of their own. They may even be envying us.

That insight, that God is to be found not in the crisis but in our response to the crisis, is the key to understanding one of the most important passages in the entire Bible.

Much of the time, we cannot control what happens to us. But we can always control how we respond to what happens to us. If we cannot choose to be lucky, to be talented, to be loved, we can choose to be grateful, to be content with who we are and what we have, and to act accordingly.

Religion is not primarily a set of beliefs, a collection of prayers, or a series of rituals. Religion is first and foremost a way of seeing. It can't change the facts about the world we live in, but it can change the way we see those facts, and that in itself can often make a real difference.

To wish to forget the hope because it wasn't realized, to try to cleanse your mind of the beautiful dream because it didn't come true, is to miss out on lie altogether, because life is designed to be lived in an alternation of hours of sunlight and hours of darkness.

They had answers to all of their own questions, but no answer for mine.