Quotes About Perspective

Life experience?" I repeated tightly. "Big picture? I've had more life experience in fourteen years than you've had in — what are you, like, a hundred?

Superstition is something that someone else believes in but you do not. Many of our own beliefs seem superstitious to others, and undoubtedly many of the accepted truths of the twenty-first century will be considered superstitions by the twenty-second century.

Why should you expect everything to work out successful? You're old enough to know better.

Don't you believe in death?" I yelled at him. "No," he answers, "and I don't believe in time either...

With that, everything was suddenly thrown into greater relief, a kind of super three-dimensionality that enhanced the presence and realness of everything in my perceptual field, from the small insects close to my face all the way to the galaxy of stars behind the moon. I was looking at everything from the larger perspective of the entire Universe.

So what's the point, then, if we can't be happy? Why are we doing any of this? Oh, there's definitely happiness, Jack said, turning his back on the ocean and looking at her. But it's just about moments, not ever-afters. He grinned. Like when you're right in the middle of the ocean with your friends, with no one trying to kill you in any kind of horrifying way. You have to appreciate these moments when they happen, 'cause obviously we don't get many of them.

The ship itself was about as long as a football field, or some other really long thing, given that may honestly could never remember how long football fields were. A hundred yards? That was like three hundred feet, wasn't it? The boat did seem long, but she was over five feet tall herself, and that's be like sixty of her end to end. Only sixty? Or was that a lot of herselves? Stupid analogies. The boat was big, that should cover it.

We read about you to be with you, to walk in someone else's shoes, to experience another life. Some of those lives are hard, and others are easy, but we're with you every step of the way. We read about people in impossible situations because we're dealing with horrible things ourselves, in our lives. And you going through your story helps us with ours, no matter how yours ends.

The surest plan to make a Man Is, think him so.

A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.

Lincoln's) experience as a lawyer compelled him not only to see that there is a principle underlying every phenomenon in human affairs, but that there are always two sides to every question, both of which must be fully understood in order to understand either, and that it is of greater advantage to an advocate to appreciate the strength than the weakness of his antagonist's position.

Think we choose our lives? No. But I don't think they're thrust upon us, either. What it feels like to me is, they're forever seeping up under our feet.

What are any of our lives but the shapes we force them into. Memory doesn't come to us of its own; we go after it, pull it into sunlight and make of it what we need, what we're driven towards, what we imagine, changing the world again and again with each new quarry, each descent, each morning.

Rina's always claimed that I expect too little from life," Standard said. "Then at least you'll never be disappointed.

Truth is, of course, relative. But then, so is relative.

You're so American. You believe everything is possible, everything will come. I know differently.

If you can think of life, for a moment, as a large house with a nursery, living and dining rooms, bedrooms, study, and so forth, all unfamiliar and bright, the chapters which follow are, in a way, like looking through the windows of this house. Certain occupants will be glimpsed only briefly. Visitors come and go. At some windows you may wish to stay longer, but alas. As with any house, all within cannot be seen.

How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?

at a luncheon, I sat next to a green-eyed young woman, a poet, who declared loftily that you learned nothing from books, it was life you learned from, passion, experience. The host, a fine old man in seventies, heard her and disagreed. His hair was white. His voice that the faint shrillness of age. "No, everything I've ever learned,", he said, "has come from books. I'd be in the darkness without them.

How can we imagine what our lives would be without the illumination of the lives of others?

Do you know what Krishnamurti says? Consciously or unconsciously, we are all completely selfish, and as long as we get what we want, we believe everything is all right.

My own life suddenly seems nothing, an old costume, a collection of rags, and I walk, I breathe to the rhythm of his which is stronger than mine.

I was in the house alone. That's usually the case because I'm writing and my wife is out in the real world doing something of great value and being with actual people. People who are not tied down to a keyboard, monitor and chair calling out to people who aren't in the house.

the mind does not distinguish between reality and what is vividly imagined. It puts all of that stimuli to work in shaping your reality and your future. So it's a good idea to think right.