Quotes About Perspective

All art is unstable. Its meaning is not necessarily that implied by the author, There is no authoritative active voice. There are only multiple readings.

And the stars look very different today.

I'm always amazed that people take what I say seriously. I don't even take what I am seriously. (2012)

The truth is of course is that there is no journey. We are arriving and departing all at the same time.

Where is it written that one should only care about big things? I fought for big things, long ago… for issues, principles, a country. Where are all of them now?... I found out something, you know. I discovered that the big things don't love you back. They take and take, and never give in return. They'll drain your blood, your soul, if you let them, and never let go.

new astronomy also had to adjust to the idea that what their senses told them everyday was untrue – that the world did not revolve around them alone.

In other words, bright people with too much time on their hands, overly influenced by notions they found in old Earth books.

Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. Don't assign to stupidity what might be due to ignorance. And try not to assume your opponent is the ignorant one — until you can show it isn't you.

all facts are created equal.

one of the most fascinating and effective kinds of lying is self-deception.

Would we be tormenting ourselves over the Kennedy assassination today if fifty cameras had been rolling, instead of just poor Abraham Zapruder's?

In other words, I look through my eyes and see only a version of the world, a version that can be, and often is, colored or twisted by what I want to see.  Another person may witness the same events, and yet observe something entirely different.

There isn't one America anymore. If there ever had been.

Someday we may look back on this era as a time when rational compromises might have enhanced both security and liberty, but those compromises were refused because each side was so busy self-righteously being right.

People generally overestimate how distinct their lives are, so the commonalities seemed to them like a series of miracles.

C]ivilians are equally bewildering to the addict. I've watched people drink a glass and a half of wine and push away the rest. What exactly is the point of that?

Most stories about one's past could fairly and adequately be told in a single sentence, and a short one at that: Everyone did the best they could.

Like the origin stories of Confucianism or early Buddhism, the modern story is about a universe that just is. Any sense of meaning comes not from the universe, but from us humans. "What's the meaning of the universe?" asked Joseph Campbell, a scholar of myth and religion. "What's the meaning of a flea? It's just there, that's it, and your own meaning is that you're there."3

Trying to look at the whole of the past is, it seems to me, like using a map of the world. No geographer would try to teach exclusively from street maps. Yet most historians teach about the past of particular nations, or even of agrarian civilizations, without ever asking what the whole of the past looks like.

Joseph L. Bower's The CEO Within, which argued for choosing leaders inside the company to serve as CEO. According to Bower, you wanted a special kind of insider: someone who intimately understood the company and its operations, but who could also maintain a sense of distance and understand what about the company needed to change—an outsider's perspective from someone on the inside.

Understand the significance of mind-set and culture. If the mind-set doesn't change, operations won't change either.

For the first time, I saw my behavior from someone else's point of view.

This isn't a new idea. Nearly two thousand years ago the Greek philosopher, Epictctus, stated that people are disturbed "not by things, but by the views we take of them." In the Book of Proverbs (23: 7) in the Old Testament you can find this passage: "For as he thinks within himself, so he is." And even Shakespeare expressed a similar idea when he said: "for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so" (Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2).

you can change your mood by changing how you think.