Quotes About Perspective

Is There a Quote That Guides Your Life? "It's a belief: Life is always happening for us, not to us. It's our job to find out where the benefit is. If we do, life is magnificent.

German poet Johann Wolfgang Goethe had the right perspective: "Mysteries are not necessarily miracles." To do the impossible (sail around the world, break the four-minute mile, reach the moon), you need to ignore the popular.

In other words, the minutiae fit around the big things, but the big things don't fit around the minutiae.

Cuanto más asociamos la experiencia con el valor del dinero, más creemos que el dinero es lo que necesitamos para vivir.

Don't call it a problem if you can avoid it.

Life doesn't have to be so damn hard. It really doesn't. Most people, my past self included, have spent too much time convincing themselves that life has to be hard, a resignation to 9-to-5 drudgery in exchange for (sometimes) relaxing weekends and the occasional keep-it-short-or-get-fired vacation.

The Art of Possibility, de Rosamund Stone Zander

When you stop caring about being right in the eyes of everyone—versus being right in your own eyes and the eyes of those who matter to you—it's amazing how little you care to waste energy trying to convince people of your view.

The Shortness of Life: Seneca on Busyness and the Art of Living Wide Rather Than Living Long.»

I used to resent obstacles along the path, thinking, "If only that hadn't happened life would be so good." Then I suddenly realized, life is the obstacles.

A good general strategy is reasoning counterfactually: if someone tells you that X is true, ask yourself—(i) what would they say if X really is true, and (ii) what would they say if X is false? If the answer to (i) and (ii) is "they will say roughly what they just said now," then their words provided you with exactly zero information.

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment." –Marcus Aurelius Emperor of Rome and Stoic philosopher, author of Meditations

Making a concerted effort to trade your short-term gratification for a longer-term payoff. Whereas everyone else wants to get credit and be "respected," you can forget credit. You can forget it so hard that you're glad when others get it instead of you—that

Well, I decided to flip it around and travel when I was really young, when I had zero money. And I had experiences that, basically, even a billion dollars couldn't have bought.

I think we go about desiring things all day long, and then wondering why we're unhappy.

You will live when you live. No one else can ever live your life and no one else will ever know what you know...

Complaints about reality are immature.

America should do a reverse Columbus. The world no longer needs to discover America; but America urgently needs to discover the world's view of America.

History is never the simple recounting of the past as it really was. It is inevitably an interpretation of the past, a retrospective vision of the past, which is limited both by the sources themselves and by the historian who selects and interprets them.

Can we have genuine knowledge of space without ever leaving our armchairs?

She gave me the slow nod women use to indicate that they understand our pain, they admire the courage with which we handle it, and they're absolutely certain that it's all our fault.

I'm an optimist in spite of a lifetime of evidence to prove that living optimistically is likely to be as disappointing as taking astrological advice,

If my life is a house," she said, "you haven't even gotten to the living room.

Science is all metaphor.