Quotes About Perspective

When we accept our own pain we can begin to see past it to the other person's woundedness. We can begin to consider that if we were in their shoes, if we stood inside their story, we might have done to others what they did to us.

To be impartial... is indeed to have taken sides already... with the status quo.

But just then, for that fraction of time, it seems as though all things are possible. You can look across the limitations of your own life, and see that they are really nothing. In that moment when time stops, it is as though you know you could undertake any venture, complete it and come back to yourself, to find the world unchanged, and everything just as you left it a moment before. And it's as though knowing that everything is possible, suddenly nothing is necessary.

An Englishman thinks a hundred miles is a long way; and American thinks a hundred years is a long time

It was in a way a comforting idea; if there was all the time in the world, then the happenings of a given moment became less important.

I only said I felt like God, Sassenach, he murmured. I never said I was.

Advice? You're too old to be given it and too young to take it.

Money might not buy happiness, I reflected, but it was a useful commodity, nonetheless.

There is a saying: in the kingdom of the blind, the one eyed man is king. I promptly invented its analogy, based it on experience. When no one knows what to do anyone with a sensible suggestion is going to be listened to.

Time makes very little difference to the basic realities of life

Not the historians. No, not them. Their greatest crime is that they presume to know what happened, how things come about, when they have only what the past chose to leave behind—for the most part, they think what they were meant to think, and it's a rare one that sees what really happened, behind the smokescreen of artifacts and paper.

a well-expressed opinion is usually better than a badly expressed fact

She supposed that it it perhaps not fair to quarrel with someone on the basis of what you thought they were thinking

After all, I thought, what were days and weeks in the presence of eternity?

Come to think, perhaps being nearly killed wasn't always a misfortune-so long as you didn't actually die of it.

My God, he thought, I'm going to die before I've been born.

But do ye not see how verra small a thing is the notion of death, between us two, Claire?" he whispered.

No, the fault lies with the artists," Claire went on. "The writers, the singers, the tellers of tales. It's them that take the past and re-create it to their liking. Them that could take a fool and give you back a hero, take a sot and make him a king.

Is it true—that I won't forget?" He paused for a moment, hand on her hair. "Aye, that's true," he said softly. "But it's true, too, that it willna matter after a time.

My father always said that was the difference between an American and an Englishman. An Englishman thinks a hundred miles is a long way; an American thinks a hundred years is a long time.

It's as though, knowing that everything is possible, suddenly nothing is necessary.

Feelings aren't truth

Life among academics had taught me that a well-expressed opinion is usually better than a badly expressed fact

But just then, for that fraction of time, it seems as though all things are possible. You can look across the limitations of your own life, and see that they are really nothing.