Quotes About Perspective

If one can only see things according to one's own belief system, one is destined to become virtually deaf, dumb, and blind.

It's obvious, but perhaps worth saying, that happiness has virtually nothing to do with the state of your intellect.

The world is a diverse place. Nobody has a monopoly on virtue or wisdom.

One of my clearest impressions about India as a child was that my parents' stories would have been impossible had they stayed. Of course, such a vision was self-serving, for it made a virtue of our displacement.

In debate, one randomly was assigned to one side or the other. This had at least one virtue - it made one see that there was more than one side to these complex issues.

The liberation of Iraq, which is already hard to justify from the perspective of American interests, at least had the virtue of freeing Iraqis from a brutal dictator. Despite all the anarchy and violence, life has gotten better for most Iraqis.

Perhaps the virtue of coming from a place like Tasmania is that you had the great gift of knowing that you were not the centre of things, yet life was no less where you were.

Back when I was an idealistic 18-year-old on my way to Chicago, I might have believed that being on the side of virtue would guarantee a good outcome. These many years later, I know better.

Failing to see the point is not a virtue.

For a long time, I thought that I was an enlightened parent by virtue of being an enlightened person. What a fool.

We're constantly told that all cultures are equal, and that every belief system is as good as the next. And it led to a kind of - and generally, that America was to be known for its flaws rather than its virtues.

I suspect I was not the first 21-year-old who thought he knew more than he did. And one of the virtues of age, one of the virtues of getting married and becoming a father, is it often leads one to take a more measured approach to life.

I pictured myself as a virus or a cancer cell and tried to sense what it would be like.

You see a virus very differently when it's caught and suspended on a slab of glass than when you're observing how it's ravaged a fellow human being.

When a person who is very ill decides to treat it like a slight virus, you play that game. If you make a big scene, I think it is yourself you are doing it for, not the person who's ill.

I think we have other things to worry about than some Zika virus.

Images contaminate us like viruses.

How can I care about needing a visa to travel if the furthest I'm going to travel is the town centre? For a person to care about Brexit - it's only for people who are in a certain state of mind.

The visceral experience of seeing a movie in three dimensions, coming at you in the theater, is obviously here to stay, because it is a unique experience. I think that kind of format is only appropriate for some genres, but I'm all for it.

It's different for people who have not seen a symphony conductor conduct from a chair. I feel very connected to the orchestra in a way that a conductor sometimes does not feel. I think it's more visceral.

Without a doubt, the majority of historical period dramas tend to be told from a certain perspective. At least in America, black people have some visibility in period dramas, although it's usually in the form of slaves or servitude.

The land of literature is a fairy land to those who view it at a distance, but, like all other landscapes, the charm fades on a nearer approach, and the thorns and briars become visible.

Surely one of the most visible lessons taught by the twentieth century has been the existence, not so much of a number of different realities, but of a number of different lenses with which to see the same reality.

I think that witnessing ecological problems visible from space is one of the new and essential roles of astronauts.