Quotes About Perspective

There's always something to say on both sides, even when one's a wrong side. That's what makes it all so tiresome-makes you wish you were dead. Take the right side and stick to that.

It's astonishing how well the worse reason looks when you try to make it appear the better.

Most people', I say 'couldn't tell you if they're happy. They're simply baffled by the question. They might, if pressed, describe happiness as the absence of pain or any particular anxiety. They might cite small moments of exhilaration...but they'd admit that even these moments are shadowed by a cloud of apprehension'.

I am you might say, chemically altered.

money should not be spent according to what the West considers the most dramatic kind of suffering.

There are times in the lives of most of us when we would have given all the world to be as we were but yesterday, though that yesterday had passed over us unappreciated and unenjoyed.

A man might pass for insane who should see things as they are.

The world is governed by opinion.

The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own

Back in the thirties we were told we must collectivize the nation because the people were so poor. Now we are told we must collectivize the nation because the people are so rich.

We always admire the other person more after we've tried to do his job.

Some people are making such thorough plans for rainy days that they aren't enjoying today's sunshine.

One of the many things nobody ever tells you about middle age is that it's such a nice change from being young.

Being adjacent to that much beauty—more than adjacent; immersed in, pierced by it—was the point. The physical risks were footnotes.

If it is not beautiful for someone, it does not exist.

If you want to make a million you don't have to understand money, what you have to understand is people's fears about money

It is the bliss of childhood that we are being warped most when we know it the least.

The Mona Lisa, the Mona Lisa....Leonardo had eye trouble....Art couldn't explain it....But now we're safe, since science can explain it. Maybe Milton wrote Paradise Lost because he was blind? And Beethoven wrote the Ninth Symphony because he was deaf...

There is a tonic strength, in the hour of sorrow and affliction, in escaping from the world and society and getting back to the simple duties and interests we have slighted and forgotten. Our world grows smaller, but it grows dearer and greater. Simple things have a new charm for us, and we suddenly realize that we have been renouncing all that is greatest and best, in our pursuit of some phantom.

Duty looks at life as a debt to be paid; love sees life as a debt to be collected. Duty is ever paying assessments; love is constantly counting its premiums.

Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.

No man must think that the world was made for him.

If faces were different when lit from above or below -- what was a face? What was anything?

I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.