Quotes About Perspective

What is true is what is true for you. No one has any right to force data on you and command you to believe it or else. If it is not true for you, it isn't true. Think your own way through things, accept what is true for you, discard the rest. There is nothing unhappier than one who tries to live in a chaos of lies.

In my vast experience, I've found it always wiser to go along with female advice.... First, you make them happy by doing what they tell you. That's the main thing. Let them think they're in control. They love it. Then, if it turns out they were right, everything's cool. If it turns out they were wrong ... then you have the pleasure of basking in the glow of superiority.

There is no comfort looking forth nor back, The present gives the lie to all her past.

I seem to have always one little window looking but into life.

A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.

Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.

Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen.

Each of us has only a quantum of compassion ... if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the centre of things.

A good writer can watch a cat pad across the street and know what it is to be pounced upon by a Bengal tiger.

A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times : It is a beautiful catastrophe.

A hundred times I have thought: New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times: it is a beautiful catastrophe.

the schist pyramids can leave us contrite. Greatness is in the intention; and not in dimensions.

No matter how intelligent a man is, he can't see what he doesn't know how to see.

You can go home again ... so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.

If you can see a thing whole ... it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives.... But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need a distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.

Success is somebody else's failure.

The counsel of the dead is not profitable to the living.

Now perhaps an excessive dread of overpopulation--overcrowding--reflects not an outward reality, but an inward state of mind. If you feel overcrowded when you're not, what does that mean? Maybe that you're afraid of human contact--of being close to people, of being touched.

To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that's the real art; it makes the work inexhaustible.

Most civilisations, perhaps, look shinier in general terms and from several light-years away.

There are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.

The anthropologist cannot always leave his own shadow out of the picture he draws.

A man who saw a miracle would reject his eyes' witness, if those with him saw nothing.

In the West, for example, people believe they must 'pursue happiness' as if it were some kind of a flighty bird that is always out of reach. In the East, we believe we are born with happiness and one of life's important tasks, my mother told me, is to protect it.