Quotes About Perspective

Alexey Alexandrovitch was standing face to face with life, with the possibility of his wife's loving someone other than himself, and this seemed to him very irrational and incomprehensible because it was life itself.

El error consistía en que había atribuido a la vida en general una respuesta dirigida sólo a mí. Me preguntaba qué era mi vida, y recibía por respuesta que era un mal y una absurdidad. Y ciertamente, mi existencia, consagrada a la complacencia de mis deseos, era absurda y mala, y la afirmación de que la vida es mala y absurda sólo se refería a la mía propia y no a la vida en general.

When you've grasped the fact that today or tomorrow you will die and nothing will be left of you, everything becomes so insignificant.

It seemed to each of them that the life he led himself was the only real life, and the life led by his friend was a mere phantasm.

And for him, who lived in a certain circle, and who required some mental activity such as usually develops with maturity, having views was as necessary as having a hat.

on which side is truth,—on the side of the thoughts which seem true and well-founded, or on the side of the lives of others and myself?

And in imagination he began to recall the best moments of his pleasant life. But strange to say none of those best moments of his pleasant life now seemed at all what they had then seemed – none of them except the first recollections of childhood. There, in childhood, there had been something really pleasant with which it would be possible to live if it could return. But the child who had experienced that happiness existed no longer, it was like a reminiscence of somebody else.

And suddenly both of them felt that though they were friends, though they had been dining and drinking together, which should have drawn them closer, yet each was thinking only of his own affairs, and they had nothing to do with one another.

All that world, that sky, that garden, that air, were not the same as I had known.

told him long ago: that God is here and everywhere. In his captivity he had learned that in Karataev God was greater, more infinite and unfathomable than in the Architect of the Universe recognized by the Freemasons. He felt like a man who after straining his eyes to see into the far distance finds what he sought at his very feet. All his life he had looked over the heads of the men around him, when he should have merely looked in front of him without straining his eyes.

Si hay tantas cabezas como maneras de pensar, hay tantos corazones como maneras de amar.

And the botanist who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue degenerates, and so on, will be as right and as wrong as the child who stands underneath and says that the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it.

At the meeting he was struck for the first time by the endless variety of men's minds, which prevents a truth from ever presenting itself identically to two persons. Even those members who seemed to be on his side understood him in their own way with limitations and alterations he could not agree to, as what he always wanted most was to convey his thought to others just as he himself understood it.

he knew that men who want something are only too ready to arrange all the evidence to suit their wishful thinking and willingly exclude anything that contradicts it.

I wish to understand in such a way that everything that is inexplicable shall present itself to me as being necessarily inexplicable, and not as being something I am under an arbitrary obligation to believe.

And from the height of this perception all that had previously tormented and preoccupied him suddenly became illumined by a cold white light without shadows, without perspective, without distinction of outline. All life appeared to him like magic-lantern pictures at which he had long been gazing by artificial light through a glass. Now he suddenly saw those badly daubed pictures in clear daylight and without a glass.

Those who can raise their thoughts to heaven will always have clear days, because the sun always shines above the clouds.

He now often remembered his conversation with Prince Andrew and quite agreed with him, though he understood Prince Andrew's thoughts somewhat differently. Prince Andrew had thought and said that happiness could only be negative, but had said it with a shade of bitterness and irony

At that meeting he was struck for the first time by the endless variety of men's minds, which prevents a truth from ever presenting itself identically to two persons. Even those members who seemed to be on his side understood him in their own way with limitations and alterations he could not agree to, as what he always wanted most was to convey his thought to others just as he himself understood it.

He soon felt that the realization of his desires gave him no more than a grain of sand out of the mountain of happiness he had expected.

People speak of misfortunes and sufferings," remarked Pierre, "but if at this moment I were asked: 'Would you rather be what you were before you were taken prisoner, or go through all this again?' then for heaven's sake let me again have captivity and horseflesh! We imagine that when we are thrown out of our usual ruts all is lost, but it is only then that what is new and good begins. While there is life there is happiness. There is much, much before us.

How is it possible to reconcile the sense that the universe in which we have been cast has a significance when we are so aware of the jumbled trivia of day-to-day living? How is

In everything near and comprehensible he had seen only what was limited, petty, commonplace, and senseless. He

Bütün kad?nlar erkeklerden daha maddecidir. Biz a?ktan muazzam bir ?ey yapar?z, onlarsa her zaman terre-a-terre.