Quotes About Perspective

Even when our death is imminent, we carry the image of ourselves moving forward, alive, into the future.

My dad was vehemently opposed to electric guitars. He did not look on that kind of music as legitimate in any way.

I BELIEVE IN THE 50-PERCENT THEORY. Half the time things are better than normal; the other half, they are worse. I believe life is a pendulum swing.

I've learned that speaking to people creates a pathway into their world, and it lets them come into mine, too.

Leaving Identity Issues to Other Folks

I believe that self-worth is where you find it and that the most beautiful form of self-worth occurs when you maximize the amount of love you share with the world, no matter how mundane or humble the circumstances may be. I believe that just because you have a college degree doesn't mean you need a job with a BlackBerry. And most important, I believe in lemonade.

Natural happiness is what we get when we get what we wanted, and synthetic happiness is what we make when we don't get what we wanted. In our society, we have a strong belief that synthetic happiness is of an inferior kind.

There are more ways to think about experience than there are experience to think about.

There is, incidently, no way of talking about cats that enables one to come off as a sane person.

Every bad thing that happens in the world is good for somebody.

Were you talking about how the Egyptians pulled the brains of mummies out through their noses? No! Nobody cares about that stuff, Arlo.

period. "Do you still think books are boring, A.J.?" she asked me.

You may not believe this," he told me, "but I was a boy once." "Just once?" I asked. "I'm a boy all the time.

Laughter is the only thing that cuts trouble down to a size where you can talk to it.

Laughter is the only thing that cuts trouble down to a size where you can talk to it. -- character Billy Clyde Puckett in Semi-Tough

Life is absurd; we must learn to enjoy the beautiful amber that coats the fossils of death strewn all around us.

We need to step back and look at the more fundamental question: What was the author originally saying? We cannot simply read our own understandings into the meaning of a word or statement someone else wrote or said. And when we look at some often bizarre-sounding parts of the Bible, we have to try to discover who the original audience was and view the text through their lens, not ours. If we don't, the possibilities for confusion are endless.

Remember, people don't buy from you because they understand what you sell—they buy from you because they feel understood.

A penny saved is still just a fucking penny.

The thing about bozos is that bozos don't know that they're bozos. Bozos think they're the shit, which makes them really annoying but also incredibly entertaining, depending on your point of view.

Maybe the best way to do something really innovative is to hire a bunch of young people who have no experience and therefore no preconceived notions about how to run a company.

I rationalize this by telling myself that while the work might be ignoble, it's not necessarily evil. We're not Hitler - we're just annoying people.

As an aside: I urge you to count the non-white faces in that Halloween photo and consider the claim about "daring to be different.")

She left for the doctor's one morning thinking she had a stomach bug and returned a cancer patient.