Quotes About Perspective

Qué nadie se ría de la única anécdota que he narrado aquí. En buena hora podrán ustedes reírse de cuanta cosa haya escrito yo en estas páginas. Pero no cuando se trata de Robinson Crusoe. ¡Por dios! Porque es este un asunto serio para mí..., y les ruego que lo tomen ustedes de la misma manera, por lo tanto.

Let the end come as it may, here I am ready to profit by it: here I am, facing both ways, with perfect ease and security - a moral agriculturist, with his eye on two crops at once, and his swindler's sickle ready for any emergency. For the next week to come, the newspaper will be more interesting to me than ever. I wonder which side I shall eventually belong to?

I am asked to tell the story of the Diamond and, instead of that, I have been telling the story of my own self.

But then I am an imaginative man; and the butcher, the baker, and the tax-gatherer are not the only credible realities in existence to my mind.

Does it matter who we are, or what we keep or lose?

On the small neutral ground of self-importance, the best men and the worst meet on the same terms.

Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.

War does one good—it teaches people geography.

but he had gained a perspective of thought in which every extreme was seen as a half-truth

A sense of humor, being born of perspective, bears a near kinship to philosophy; each is the soul of the other.

Men look to love and life for everything; they receive a little less than that; they imagine that they have received nothing: these are the three stages of the pessimist.

For one and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent. For example, music is good to the melancholy, bad to mourners, and indifferent to the dead.

There is no humorist like history.

The world is not "my idea," as Schopenhauer called it; it is a stern reality of which you and I are passing spawns.

Yet he was not all unhappy: the peace and quiet which he had never had when sane were his now; Nature had had mercy on him when she made him mad. He caught his sister once weeping as she looked at him, and he could not understand her tears: "Lisbeth," he asked, "why do you cry? Are we not happy?" On one occasion he heard talk of books; his pale face lit up; "Ah!" he said, brightening, "I too have written

Men readily listen to Utopias, and are easily induced to believe that in some wonderful manner everybody will become everybody's friend, especially when someone is heard denouncing the evils now existing,... which are said to arise out of the possession of private property. These evils, however, arise from quite another source—the wickedness of human nature.

Science without philosophy, facts without perspective and valuation, cannot save us from havoc and despair. Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.

History," [Voltaire] concludes, "is after all nothing but a pack of tricks which we play upon the dead";40 we transform the past to suit our wishes for the future, and in the upshot "history proves that anything can be proved by history.

When I have slain an enemy," explained a Brazilian philosopher-chief, "it is surely better to eat him than to let him waste.. . . The worst is not to be eaten, but to die; if I am killed it is all the same whether my tribal enemy eats me or not. But I could not think of any game that would taste better than he would. . . . You whites are really too dainty.

All that remained was the scientific specialist, who knew more and more about less and less, and the philosophical speculator, who knew less and less about more and more. The specialist put on blinders in order to shut out from his vision all the world but one little spot, to which he glued his nose. Perspective was lost. Facts replaced understanding; and knowledge, split into a thousand isolated fragments, no longer generated wisdom. Every science, and every branch of philosophy, developed

For as no perfect view of a country can be taken from a flat; so it is impossible to discover the remote and deep parts of any science by standing upon the level of the same science, or without ascending to a higher.

He had the philosopher's disease of seeing so far ahead that all the little pleasant shapes and colors of existence passed under his nose unseen.

Having first determined the question according to his will, man then resorts to experience; and bending her into conformity with his placets, leads her about like a captive in a procession.

I was only 44, which is childhood philosophy.