Quotes About Perspective

Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.

To rise again - to be the same person that you were - you must have your memory perfectly fresh and present; for it is memory that makes your identity. If your memory be lost, how will you be the same man? Why do mankind flatter themselves that they alone are gifted with a spiritual and immortal principle? Perhaps from their inordinate vanity. I am persuaded that if a peacock could speak he would boast of his soul, and would affirm that it inhabited his magnificent tail.

only a fool would try to compress a hundred centuries into a hundred pages of hazardous conclusions. We proceed.

because we are human we suppose that all events lead up to man and are designed to subserve his needs. But this is an anthropocentric delusion, like so much of our thinking.

No man is educated for statesmanship who cannot see his time from the perspective of the past.

I have said to myself a thousand times that I should be happy if I were but as ignorant as my old neighbor; and yet it is a happiness which I do not desire.

What is wisdom? It is an application of experience to present problems, a view of the part in the light of the whole, a perspective of the moment in the vista of years past and years to come.

How can we understand man if we do not understand religion?

Spinoza was right: "in so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect it participates in eternity."127

Kant is the last person in the world whom we should read on Kant.

How little you know the age you live in, says a god in Ovid, if you fancy that honey is sweeter than cash in hand.

How much more suffering is caused by the thought of death than by death itself!

Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.

The Eskimos believed that the Europeans had come to Greenland to learn manners and virtues.

One work of genius is worth a thousand commentaries.

That is the way a white man remembers a battle. So many soldiers here, so many there. Such a captain here. Such a lieutenant there. This colonel in one place. That major in another. The horses precisely here, the cannon exactly there. But not an Indian. An Indian remembers where his mother fell bayoneted, or his little brother had his skull smashed, or his big sister cried for mercy and was shot in the mouth.

We don't live in a series of plot points. We should be thankful for that. We should realize how lucky we are.

I know that I am not right about everything, and yet I am simultaneously convinced that I am. I believe these two things completely, and yet they are in catastrophic logical opposition to each other.

Haven't we all done this? Hardened a particular position, not as a response to superior information, but because of anger?

We've come to understand over the past hundred years that information is colored with subjectivity: What we know depends on how we interpret our information base.

A reverent agnosticism can be on occasion a better evangelism than a religion which knows all the answers.

This life's dim windows of the soul Distorts the heavens from pole to pole And leads you to believe a lie When you see with, not through, the eye.

To see a World in a grain of sand, And a Heaven in a wild flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour.

Man was made for joy and woe Then when this we rightly know Through the world we safely go. Joy and woe are woven fine A clothing for the soul to bind.