Quotes About Perspective

I don't think white people identify themselves as white Americans. They think their perspective is objective. They don't realize they're always invested in the advancement of white people.

There are benefits to being without nostalgia. Certainly nostalgia and being without nostalgia relieve the past.

What happens to you doesn't belong to you, only half concerns you. It's not yours. Not yours only." - Claudia Rankine (cited near the title page of 'An American Marriage")

What happens to you doesn't belong to you, only half concerns you. It's not yours. Not yours only. - Claudia Rankine (cited near the title page of 'An American Marriage' by Tayari Jones)

I learned early that being right pales next to staying in the room.

I don't know what's right. I don't know what's wrong," she said with a shrug. "I don't think anyone knows for sure. They may think they know; they may even convince themselves of it. But sometimes you can't be sure until much, much later when you see how it all worked it out. You just have to do the best you can and hope that it all works out.

I'm not an optimist. I'm a realist ... or maybe even a pessimist. The glass has water in it; that's all I know.

If I'm signing autographs and I see one hundred people in a line I've got to remind myself, "That person is one one-hundredth of my day, but to them I'm their day." You know what I mean? Unless they meet J.Lo later on.

I'm around a lot of good people who keep me grounded and don't let me get too high above my raisings. I have some good friends who don't talk about my job, and that's nice. Those are the friends who are my favorites. That helps a lot.

But I was going to be a teacher my entire life, so I wasn't counting on money to much.

It's not quite as valuable as if it had been written in 1929, when Martin Luther King was born.

We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles, rather than by the quality of our service and relationship to humanity.

it gave me a new appreciation for objective appraisal

I had thought the destination was what was important, but it turned out it was the journey.

People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.

If you give up smoking, drinking, and loving, you don't actually live longer; it just seems longer.

As anyone who has ever been around a cat for any length of time well knows cats have enormous patience with the limitations of the human kind.

You cannot expect everything even from the friendliest cat. It is still a cat.

There can never be a clock at the center of the Universe to which everyone can set their watches. Your entire life can be the blink of an eye to an alien who leaves Earth traveling close to the speed of light, then returns an hour later to find that you have been dead for centuries.

A particular bear...sees a particular this

Man's inability to understand and appreciate the thought and viewpoint of another man would be a stumbling block which no amount of mechanical ability could overcome.

People keep asking how anthropology is different from sociology, and everybody gets nervous.

The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about.

Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.