Quotes About Perspective

We councillors think we are men of vision and learning, we gravely delineate our position, set forth our plans and argue our case far into the night. Then some little girl sweeps through and upsets the candle and sets fire to our sleeve; leaves us slapping ourselves like madmen, trying to save our skin.

Try to work on the scale of eternity. Do you see? Otherwise you will be fettered by trivia. The daily frustrations will cripple you.

if you're dead, Peterborough is as good a place as any.

The dead do not come back to complain of their burial. It is the living who are exercised about these matters.

I gave up fighting because, when I lived in Florence, I looked at frescoes every day

If another man were saying this, he'd be trying to start a fight. When Thomas More says it, it leads to an invitation to dinner.

I can remember the days,' Mirabeau said, 'when we didn't have public opinion. No one had ever heard of such a thing.

You wonder what else you have always believed, believed without foundation.

As the combatants will always tell you, you really needed to see it, you had to be there. . .

Let him hear the conclusion of events; he does not need to live through them.

I truly believe I should be a better man if the weather were better.

The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if only you can see it.

It is not so much who is guilty, as whose guilt is of service to you. . . we are not priests. We don't want their sort of confession. We are lawyers. We want the truth little by little and only those parts of it we can use.

how to retell exactly what had been said and done, without putting your own interpretation on it, and submit it to another judgement? It wasn't possible.

Hilary Mantel

He likes driving very fast on the wrong side of the road," said Sarah. "Which I can completely understand.

Once, when Tom was over here, to tease Rose, I asked him, "Before she was born, can you remember? Were things just the same as they are these days? Did it still rain and get dark and all the stuff it does now? Did the sun go up and down in exactly the same way?" Yes," Tom said, and then he smiled at Rose and said, "No. Not really. Not exactly the same way.

I used to think that fifteen would be nearly grown up," said her sister Naomi, "until you started being it

Do you think it (hedgehog) can possibly have gone to Heaven?" This was Ruth's ritual question when confronted with death and Naomi was always firm. "No", she said at once. "Because what would it do when it got there? Eat slugs and snails that had gone to hell? It's just died, that's all. No good getting all drippy about it.

No sane person should believe that something is subjective merely because it cannot be settled beyond controversy.

But remember that truth itself becomes a lie in the twisted minds of our conquerors.

Mother," said Janna, "if the Frosches were here first, why do they have the fourth floor? Why did they not take the one we have?" "The Baron arranged it all," her mother said curtly.

There's always going to be both: -magic & disaster- and we get to decide what to put our focus on.

The truth is that sometimes it is hard even for me to recognize the Hillary Clinton that other people see.