Quotes About Perspective

I've gotten more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.

One must never forget when misfortunes come that it is quite possible they are saving one from something much worse; or that when you make some great mistake, it may very easily serve you better than the best-advised decision. Life is a whole, and luck is a whole, and no part of them can be separated from the rest.

When you're 20 you care what everyone thinks. When you're 40 you stop caring what everyone thinks. When you're 60 you realize no one was ever thinking about you in the first place.

When you are on a great horse, you have the best seat you will ever have.

Anyone who was not a liberal at 20 years of age had no heart, while anyone who was still a liberal at 40 had no head.

The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward.

In war and policy one should always try to put oneself in the position of what Bismarck called "the Other Man". The more fully and sympathetically a Minister can do this the better are his chances of being right. The more knowledge he possesses of the opposite point of view, the less puzzling it is to know what to do. But imagination without deep and full knowledge is a snare

The worst quarrels only arise when both sides are equally in the right and in the wrong.

I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me

One must never forget when misfortunes come that it is quite possible they are saving one from something much worse; or that when you make some great mistake, it may very easily serve you better than the best-advised decision.

Logic, like science, must be the servant and not the master of man.

Toilet paper too thin, newspapers too fat!

Comme dit Kinglake : un examen si minutieux qu'il finit par placer un objet sous un angle de vision mensonger est un plus mauvais guide qu'un rapide coup d'oeil qui embrasse les choses dans leurs justes proportions.

Il ne faut jamais oublié quand un malheur vous frappe, qu'il peut très bien vous épargner un ennui pire encore; ou que, quand vous commettez une lourde erreur, cela peut très bien vous servir mieux que la décision la plus sage. La vie est un tout, la chance est un tout, et on ne peut séparer aucun élément du reste.

Evidently he had the first quality of an angler, which is not to measure the pleasure by the catch.

ancient Greek saying, 'Love as if you shall hereafter hate, and hate as if you shall hereafter love.

No one can understand history without continually relating the long periods which are constantly mentioned to the experiences of our own short lives. Five years is a lot. Twenty years is the horizon to most people. Fifty years is antiquity. To understand how the impact of destiny fell upon any generation of men one must first imagine their position and then apply the time-scale of our own lives.

We remember the sardonic war-time joke about the optimist and the pessimist. The optimist was the man who did not mind what happened so long as it did not happen to him. The pessimist was the man who lived with the optimist.

Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.' DR. JOHNSON

rebuked his son Oskar for waking him at seven to tell him the news: "Why did you want to wake me up an hour earlier? It would still have been true at eight." And with this he went to sleep again till his usual calling-time.

If the present," I said a few weeks later, "tries to sit in judgment on the past it will lose the future.

did not overlook the broad principle that in war as in life everything is relative.

By what process could the slaughter of ten million men and the destruction of one-third of the entire savings of the greatest nations of the world have ushered in a Golden Age?

When the notes of life ring false, men should correct them by referring to the tuning-fork of death. It is when that clear menacing tone is heard that the love of life grows keenest in the human heart.