Quotes About Perspective

How can I be secure? (Pause.) Through amassing wealth beyond all measure? No. And what's beyond measure? That's a sickness. That's a trap. There is no measure. Only greed.

An Evangelical who thinks the world is ending is called a religious fanatic; a liberal who thinks so is called an environmentalist."—Dennis Prager * Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind.

It's not a lie. It's a gift for fiction.

Troy itself was disappointingly small. Like little more than your ordinary city block and a few stories in height, practically. Although now that I remember, everything in William Shakespeare's house at Stratford-on-Avon was astonishingly tiny, too. As if only imaginary people had lived there then. Or perhaps it is only the past itself, which is always smaller than one had believed.

Matisse, consultado sobre la piel verde: No estoy pintando una mujer. Estoy pintando un cuadro.

Ese material se te ocurre cuando estás borracho? Preguntó un primo de Faulkner.

Certainly reality is altered.

Standing to one side watching the politicians and the journalists and the cameras is one of the factory's owners, John Kernahan, who tells me Sulo's annual turnover is $85 million. So the carbon tax? "It's not a biggie.

Cavanaugh believed that the term "martial arts" was a self-contradiction. When it came to combat, there was nothing artistic, nothing smooth and graceful about it.

it's not necessarily helpful to talk about poetry as if it were a device to be assembled or a religious experience to be undergone. Rather, it would be useful to talk about poetry as if it were, for example, Belgium

Politics look very simple to the outsider whether he is a businessman or a soldier – it is only when you get into it that all the angles and hard work become apparent. James Forrestal

I had a tumor. But it was great.

There will be peaks of great joy from which to crow and vales of tears out of which to climb. When and why they will happen, no one can say, but they will happen. To all of us. We will all go back and forth from one to the other countless times during a lifetime. This is not some call to bipartisanship between inimical sides. The Happy and the Sad are the same population.

Of course, to a true geek, the glass is neither half-full nor half-empty. It's twice as big as it currently needs to be, though a reasonable reserve margin is not a bad thing to have ready, just in case.

You don't think your way to a new way of living. You live your way to a new way of thinking.

At the end of a miserable day, instead of grieving my virtual nothing, I can always look at my loaded wastepaper basket and tell myself that if I failed, at least I took a few trees down with me.

Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.

I love things made out of animals. It's just so funny to think of someone saying, I need a letter opener. I guess I'll have to kill a deer.

Have a blessed day." This can make you feel like you've been sprayed against your will with God cologne.

I've always had a way with the little people, making it a point to humor them without looking down my nose at their wasted empty lives.

After I die, and you read something bad about yourself in my diary, do yourself a favor and keep reading," I often say to Hugh. "I promise that on the next page you'll find something flattering. Or maybe the page after that.

I can't seem to fathom that the things important to me are not important to other people as well, and so I come off sounding like a missionary, someone whose job it is to convert rather than listen.

You know you're young when someone asks you for money and you take it as a compliment.

I'd always been afraid of sick people, and so had my mother. It wasn't that we feared catching their brain aneurysm or accidentally ripping out their IV. I think it was their fortitude that frightened us. Sick people reminded us not of what we had, but of what we lacked. Everything we said sounded petty and insignificant; our complaints paled in the face of theirs, and without our complaints, there was nothing to say.