Quotes About Perspective

Experience itself is convention and we are outside of experience.

There is no relation between using the mind — as one does, in repairing shoes, and seeing it.

up. "The thing you have to understand about people," he says, "is that most of them suck, and you don't want to be like them anyway.

No good story is quite true.

Don't get me wrong. A good marriage, adequate financial resources, even a clean home and well-behaved children do bring some measure of happiness. However, temporal blessings, as wonderful as they may be, are only a taste of the real thing. They cannot sustain inner happiness any more than eating a scrumptious meal keeps tomorrow's hunger at bay.

From Christ's perspective, success isn't measured by how much we do, how much we earn, or how much we have, but by how well we love and what kind of person we're becoming in the midst of life's activities.

It is not your husband's lies that will do the most damage to you. It's the lies you tell yourself.

The way we view God does not change God, but it changes us and how we relate to him.

Every truth bends and reshapes itself or is reshaped by other forces.

We're all bozos on the bus, so we might as well sit back and enjoy the ride.

We are on the cusp of this time where I can say, "I speak as a citizen of the world" without others saying, "God, what a nut."

When you think about a presidential candidate spending all of his or her time talking to that tiny, tiny fraction of us who have the capacity to fund political elections, it's obvious why the perspective of government is skewed relative to what most Americans care about.

Perhaps it is a fault of the species who thrive in peace, mutual help, aspirations for more of the same -- to forget that outside these borders dwell very different types of mind, feeding on different fuel.

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.

It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.

The book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty -- and vice versa.

Often the mass emotions are those which seem the noblest, best and most beautiful. And yet, inside a year, five years, a decade, five decades, people will be asking, "How could you have believed that?" because events will have taken place that will have banished the said mass emotions to the dustbin of history.

I do not think writers ought ever to sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme ... If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.

Mostly getting old is boring. I hate the stiffness in the bones. I was physically arrogant for years. I don't like it now that I have difficulty getting around. But a certain equanimity sets in, a certain detachment. Things seem less desperately important than they once did, and that's a pleasure.

I spend a good deal of time wondering how we will seem to the people who come after us. This is not an idle interest, but a deliberate attempt to strengthen the power of that "other eye," which we can use to judge ourselves.

Oh Christ. I couldn't care less.... I can't say I'm overwhelmed with surprise. I'm 88 years old and they can't give the Nobel to someone who's dead, so I think they were probably thinking they'd probably better give it to me now before I've popped off.

Sometimes I pick up a book and I say: Well, so you've written it first, have you? Good for you. O.K., then I won't have to write it.

When you look at my life, you can go back to the late 1930s, what I saw was, first of all, Hitler, he was going to live forever. Mussolini was in for 10,000 years. You had the Soviet Union, which was, by definition, going to last forever. There was the British empire -- nobody imagined it could come to an end. So why should one believe in any kind of permanence?

It was all nonsense to see things in terms of peaks and crises: the personal events, like the public ones, were long-term affairs, after all. They built up.... It is after--at least months, but it is usually years--that a person will say, My God, my whole life has changed, talking about a passion of love or hate, a marriage, a testing job of work. My life has changed because I have changed.