Quotes About Perspective

I can just hear Aaron saying that it's slight compared with the big topics they usually tackle." "Slight!" I almost shouted. "Why is it that people always think bad, dark things are more real and important than things that lift you up and make you feel life is worth living? You ought to tell them that in a song.

Some foolish people must have a tragedy, for they cannot believe in happy endings

If human lives be, for their very brevity, sweet, then beast lives are sweeter still...

Take this single tree. They could cut it down and make half of it into an incense tray, decorate it with lacquer set with gold or silver filigree, and set it in an alcove of an aristocrat or man of high rank as a tasteful ornament. The other half they could make into wooden clogs for stepping through the mud. When you look at the two different shapes, one is admired while the other is considered mean, but they're the same in terms of the cutting down of a living tree.

Count your nights by stars, not shadows; count your life with smiles, not tears.

A wise man cares not for that which he cannot have.

You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask.

Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.

For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Irene.

Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone. 'But which is the stone that supports the bridge?' Kublai Khan asks. 'The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,' Marco answers, 'but by the line of the arch that they form.' Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: 'Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.' Polo answers: 'Without stones there is no arch.

A person's life consists of a collection of events, the last of which could also change the meaning of the whole, not because it counts more than the previous ones but because once they are included in a life, events are arranged in an order that is not chronological but, rather, corresponds to an inner architecture.

Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space. I don't mean escaping into dreams or the irrational. I mean that I have to change my approach, look at the world from a different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verification. (Terence sent me this quote the other day. A good battle cry, I believe... and one I wholeheartedly respect.)

Whether there is such a thing as Reality, of which the various levels are only partial aspects, or whether there are only levels, is something that literature cannot decide. Literature recognizes rather the *reality of the levels.*

Às vezes a gente se imagina incompleto e é apenas jovem.

Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.

A veces uno se cree incompleto y es solamente joven.

If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance.

The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow." - from "The Adventure of a Photographer

Maybe you have to become a mother to get to the real sense of everything. Or a prostitute.

At times the mirror increases a thing's value, at times denies it.

although science interests me just because of its efforts to escape from anthropomorphic knowledge, I am nonetheless convinced that our imagination cannot be anything but anthropomorphic.

How is it possible to defeat not the authors but the functions of the author, the idea that behind each book there is someone who guarantees a truth in that world of ghosts and inventions by the mere fact of having invested in it his own truth, of having identified himself with that construction of words?

A volte uno si crede incompleto ed è soltanto giovane.

And Marco's answer was: 'Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.