Quotes About Perspective

Your misery doesn't change their situation. You can't lessen their misery by carrying it for them inside you.

complaining about the way a relative would try to make me feel guilty, my father quipped, "Just because she sends you guilt doesn't mean you have to accept delivery.

I regularly made an effort to remember one of the most important lessons from my training: There's no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn't be ranked, because pain is not a contest. Spouses often forget this, upping the ante on their suffering—I had the kids all day. My job is more demanding than yours. I'm lonelier than you are. Whose pain wins—or loses?

If the queen had balls, she'd be the king." If you go through life picking and choosing, if you don't recognize that "the perfect is the enemy of the good," you may deprive yourself of joy. At first patients are taken aback by my bluntness,

Which all boils down to: Happiness equals reality minus expectations.

Sometimes the changes you want in another person aren't on that person's agenda

You're going to have to feel pain—everyone feels pain at times—but you don't have to suffer so much. You're not choosing the pain, but you're choosing the suffering.

If the queen had balls, she'd be the king.

We feel completely stuck, trapped in our emotional cells, but there's a way out—as long as we're willing to see it.

There's a difference between pain and suffering,

Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith and experience something before its meaning becomes apparent. It's one thing to talk about leaving behind a restrictive mindset. It's another to stop being so restrictive.

But feelings are actually more like weather systems—they blow in and they blow out. Just because you feel sad this minute or this hour or this day doesn't mean you'll feel that way in ten minutes or this afternoon or next week.

John lowers himself onto the couch, kicks off his shoes, then stretches out, lies down, and adjusts his head on the pillows. Usually he sits cross-legged on the sofa, so this is a first. I notice, too, that there's no food today. "Okay, you win," he begins with a sigh. "Win what?" I ask. "The pleasure of my company," he deadpans. I raise my eyebrows.

I'll bet you could name five truly difficult people off the top of your head right now—some you assiduously avoid, others you would assiduously avoid if they didn't share your last name. But sometimes—more often than we tend to realize—those difficult people are us. That's right—sometimes hell is us. Sometimes we are the cause of our difficulties. And if we can step out of our own way, something astonishing happens.

I know that often people create faulty narratives to make themselves feel better in the moment even though it makes them feel worse over time—and that sometimes, they need somebody else to read between the lines.

John said that when he was struggling with the pressure of his marriage and his career, he used to think that there'd be a point when he'd be happy again, and then when Gabe died, he thought he'd never be happy again. Now, he says, he's come to feel it's not either/or, yes or no, always or never. "Maybe happiness is sometimes,

The First Confession Allow me to get defensive for a minute. You see, when I told Wendell that everything was just fine until the breakup, I was telling the absolute truth. Or, rather, the truth as I knew it. Which is to say, the truth as I wanted to see it.

I'm reminded," he begins, "of a famous cartoon. It's of a prisoner, shaking the bars, desperately trying to get out—but to his right and left, it's open, no bars.

Forgiveness is a tricky thing, in the way that apologies can be. Are you apologizing because it makes you feel better or because it will make the other person feel better? Are you sorry for what you've done or are you simply trying to placate the other person who believes you should be sorry for the thing you feel completely justified in having done? Who is the apology for?

A felicidade equivale à realidade menos as expectativas.

Our experiences with this person are important because we're probably feeling something pretty similar to what everyone else in this patient's life feels.

Einstein: "No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.

Often, though, people carry around the belief that the majority of their problems are circumstantial or situational—which is to say, external. And if the problems are caused by everyone and everything else, by stuff out there, why should they bother to change themselves?

Every day, our patients are opening up questions that we have to think about for ourselves. If they can see themselves more clearly through our reflections, we can see ourselves more clearly through theirs.