Quotes About Perspective

It is always better to admire the best among our foes rather than the worst among our friends

All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.

Remember that the best medical treatment is a sense of relativism. No matter how badly you might feel, take comfort in knowing there's someone who feels much worse.

lmost everything looked more beautiful from a distance, the earth becoming more perfect as one ascended and came closer to seeing the world from God's eyes, man's hovels and palaces disappearing, the peaks and valleys of geography fading to become strokes of a paintbrush on a divine sphere.

Are you going to be the kind of person who always pays the asking price?" my mother demanded. "Or the kind who fights to find out what something's really worth?

I am a sleeper, a spy, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds. I am not a misunderstood mutant from a comic book or a horror movie, though some have treated me as such. I am simply able to see any issue from both sides.

Some might say I was seeing things, but the true optical illusion was in seeing others and oneself as undivided and whole, as if being in focus was more real than being out of focus. We thought our reflection in the mirror was who we truly were, when how we saw ourselves and how others saw us was often not the same. Likewise,

But I was also one of those unfortunate cases who could not help but wonder whether my need for American charity was due to my having first been the recipient of American aid.

Before I only wanted to change the world. I still want that, but it was ironic how I never wanted to change myself. Yet that's where revolutions start! And it's the only way revolutions can continue, if we keep looking inward, looking at how others might see us. That's what happened when I met Sofia. I saw myself the way she saw me.

One must listen to them carefully to understand that while pain is universal, it is also utterly private. We

For we are the ones most able to know ourselves and yet the most unable to know ourselves. It's as if our noses are pressed up against the pages of a book, the words right in front of us but which we cannot read. Just as distance is needed for legibility, so it is that if we could only split ourselves in two and gain some distance from ourselves, we could see ourselves better than anyone else can.

All this time I kept my gaze fixed on hers, an enormously difficult task given the gravitational pull exerted by her cleavage. While I was critical of many things when it came to so-called Western civilization, cleavage was not one of them. The Chinese might have invented gunpowder and the noodle, but the West had invented cleavage, with profound if underappreciated implications.

Forgive me. I'm talking politics again. I swear not to talk about politics tonight, my brother. You know how hard that is for someone who believes everything is political.

Even if they found themselves in Heaven, our countrymen would find occasion to remark that it was not as warm as Hell.

Don't you see that the Americans need the anti-American?

Even if they found themselves in Heaven, our countrymen would find occasion to remark that it was not as warm as Hell. Why's

But in the month when this confession begins, my way of seeing the world still seemed more of a virtue than a danger, which is how some dangers first appear.

Saigon had also changed names after it changed hands, but they couldn't bring themselves to call it Ho Chi Mind City. Neither could the taxi driver who ferried them from their hotel to the house, even though he was too young to remember a time when the city was officially Saigon.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That sounds good, but things are never that simple. The problem, you see, is how to know what we want to have done to us.

Che Guevera and the Maoist PhD saw the Vietnamese revolution only from afar, with all its glamorous makeup, whereas I had seen it close up, denuded. Three million people dead for a revolution was, arguably, worth it, although that was always easier for the living! But three million people dead for this revolution? We had simply traded one Repressive State Apparatus for another one, and the only difference was that it was our own.

As with the Westerner, the Easterner was never so bored as he was when on his own shores.

To be anti-American only makes you a reactionary. In our case, having defeated the Americans, we no longer defined ourselves as anti-American. We are simply one hundred percent Vietnamese.

Another affordable way to add a drop of loveliness to the world was not to change it but to change how one saw it.

I've tried love," Louis said, as if it were a kind of soft, malodorous French cheese. "It's okay, but the problem with it is the other person involved. She has a mind of her own. You can't say the same thing about things.