Quotes About Perspective

I always loved 'Gullivers Travel's. A giant man in a tiny world, a tiny man in a giant world. And there is one line I remember, though perhaps I imagined it: 'I like a tiny man with a lot of spunk in him.' Well, I'm a tiny man and so have I. And I can prove it.

I suppose my biggest frustration is that we as white people come into a culture and demand that the natives do things our way. I want to see their lives bettered as much as anyone, but who says we have somehow arrived at the perfect way to live? Especially for specific areas of the world?

It is unfortunate that so many in society choose to see evil where only innocence exists.

I don't think this city is ugly. And I don't believe in fairy tales.

You can't change the world in the space of a single conversation, can you?

There are some days that prove that it's a man's world and we women are only here as visitors.

He saw things in a way that others did not, so that a city I had lived in all my life seemed a different place, so that a woman became beautiful with the light on her face.

Yes, well, life is a folly. If you live long enough, nothing is surprising.

I had walked along that street all my life, but had never been so aware that my back was to my home

For example, all human beings grow up believing that life should turn out one way or another. This drives you, as an individual, to constantly compare your current reality with the ideal in your mind of how life "should" turn out—which in turn affects a startling amount of what you do.

A paradigm is a constellation of concepts and values shared by a community of people.

You shift the way you are being by creating a new context from which to relate to reality.

Life does not turn out the way it "should." Nor does life turn out the way it "shouldn't." Life turns out the way it does.

You are shifting from … … the past occurring as a series of events that "really happened" and are "the" truth … … to … … the past occurring as a series of interpretations you've made about events that happened, all of which are valid and none of which represent "the" truth.

It's as if the entire human race were one big village of people whispering over and over the same message to each other, so that no one can help but believe it.

Then let me ask you something, Terry. In terms of the whole situation, if you could miraculously have your relationship with your boss altered, what would you have it be?

SUPPOSE YOU closed this book right now and started to tell a story about your life from now until the moment you die—the moment that they throw dirt on your face and your life turns out the way it does. What would that story include?

In this situation, at this moment, what's not possible for me?

Noble words, my friend; you can't drink them or wrap them around your feet or burn them in your firepit or give them to children crying in hunger......They will cry for a month, then they will eat his share of the food. And wouldn't he want it that way?

We are all free to make our own decisions–but if the information on which we base those decisions is carefully selected and presented to us in the "pre-thought for you" form of a story, then how much of an informed decision can we make?

This is why I love poems: they require me to sit still, listen deeply, and imagine putting myself in someone else's unfamiliar shoes. The world I return to when the poem is over seems fuller and more comprehensible as a result.

Sometimes this poem tells itself nothing matters, All's a joke. Relax, it says, everything's Taken care of. (A poem can lie.)

In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.

My point is, it's not cut and dried, black and white, good and bad. It lives where everything lives: somewhere in the middle. Where everything lives, where all the rest of us live, everyone but you.