Quotes About Perspective

My friends tell me that I have a tendency to point out problems without offering solutions, but they never tell me what I should do about it.

Our inability to recall how we really felt is why our wealth of experiences turns out to be poverty of riches.

If someone offered you a pill that would make you permanently happy, you would be well advised to run fast and run far. Emotion is a compass that tells us what to do, and a compass that perpetually stuck on north is worthless.

The things we do when we expect our lives to continue are naturally and properly different than the things we might do if we expected them to end abruptly. We go easy on the lard and tobacco, smile dutifully at yet another of our supervisor's witless jokes, read books like this one when we could be wearing paper hats and eating pistachio macaroons in the bathtub, and we do each of these things in the charitable service of the people we will soon become.

The average newspaper boy in Pittsburgh knows more about the universe than did Galileo, Aristotle, Leonardo, or any of those other guys who were so smart they only needed one name.

Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel. HORACE WALPOLE

The world is much bigger than you thought

One day you will die, but death is not your enemy and it only makes you to appreciate life's gifts more with each passing second.

being different is not a problem. It's just being different. but feeling different is a problem. When you feel different, the feeling can actually change the way you see the world.

Once we realize that the boundaries between work and play are artificial, we can take matters in hand and begin the difficult task of making life more livable.

We often understand something better when we see it in comparison with something else than when we see it in isolation.

First, we can distance through space. The classic move is known, unsurprisingly, as the "fly-on-the-wall technique.

Greatness and nearsightedness are incompatible. Meaningful achievement depends on lifting one's sights and pushing toward the horizon.

Fully detached beats semidetached.

But the truth is different. You're much more likely to have a Silver Emma moment than a Bronze Borghini one. When researchers have tracked people's thoughts by asking them to keep daily diaries or by pinging them randomly to ask what's on their mind, they've discovered that If Onlys outnumber At Leasts in people's lives—often by a wide margin.[7] One study found that 80 percent of the counterfactuals people generate are If Onlys.

I used to believe in the value of happy endings. Now I believe that the power of endings rests not in their unmitigated sunniness but in their poignancy and meaning.

Listening to the conversations of those nearby has a bad reputation. But we all do it, so we might as well make it worthwhile. Next time you're in a position to eavesdrop, listen carefully to what your targets are saying. Then imagine yourself as one of those people in that situation. What are you (that is, him or her) thinking and feeling at that moment? What emotions, if any, are coursing through your body? How did you end up in this particular place at this particular time?

Story represents a pathway to understanding that doesn't run through the left side of the brain.

In those situations, the ability to move others hinges less on problem solving than on problem finding.

when both parties view their encounters as opportunities to learn, the desire to defeat the other side struggles to find the oxygen it needs.

Most inventions and breakthroughs come from reassembling existing ideas in new ways.

Empathy is the ability to imagine yourself in someone else's position and to intuit what that person is feeling. It is the ability to stand in others' shoes, to see with their eyes, and to feel with their hearts. It is something we do pretty much spontaneously, an act of instinct rather than the product of deliberation.

Empathy isn't sympathy—that is, feeling bad for someone else. It is feeling with someone else, sensing what it would be like to be that person. Empathy is a stunning act of imaginative derring-do, the ultimate virtual reality—climbing into another's mind to experience the world from that person's perspective.

Switch by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.