Quotes About Perspective

The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes

Poetry is like a beef bouillon cube; it's hardly ever needed (or perhaps never needed at all); it sits in its precious wrapper, well out of view, until everyone has forgotten it's there.

One of the main reasons that we lose our enthusiasm in life is because we become ungrateful..we let what was once a miracle become common to us. We get so accustomed to his goodness it becomes a routine..

Remember in the midst of your most grievous afflictions that the worst state of a believer is better than the best state of an unbeliever.

The Japanese samurai held the view that what was serious for the common man was but a game for the valiant. Noble

Nicht um meine Sprache zu verlernen, lerne ich andere Sprachen, sondern ich gehe bloß durch fremde Gärten, um für meine Sprache Blumen zu holen.

because we cannot see things beforehand, and only know how dreadfully miserable we are, we think it is always going to be so.

I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses.

I used to measure the heavens Now the Earth's shadows I measure My mind was in the heavens, Now the shadow of my body rests here

I used to measure the skies, now I measure the shadows of Earth. Sky-bound was the mind, earthbound the body rests.

A writer worth his salt is not going to write about how damned lovely it is; it isn't, that's why so many people tell themselves it is [lovely].

In Virginia... all geese are swans.

Once you've lived in France, you don't want to live anywhere else, including France.

Did you ever think, maybe you're not too big? Maybe this town's just too small? - Big Fish

It was Celeste, his mom. Only now she was younger than he was.

This whole time, I thought it was some kind of prophecy. Like I was special, unique, and the universe had picked me for some reason. But that's not really true. It's like these cards. You get what you're dealt, but it's how you play them that matters.

The trouble with you, Vic, he said, is that you think of the world as a sort of huge museum with too many visitors allowed in.

What is money, after all? Almost nothing, when one has a sufficiency of it.

The secret of survival is a defective imagination. The inability of mortals to imagine things as they truly are is what allows them to live, since one momentary, unresisted glimpse of the world's totality of suffering would annihilate them on the spot, like a whiff of the most lethal sewer gas.

Lately I had been finding it hard to understand the simplest things people said to me, as if what they were speaking in were a form of language I did not recognise; I would know the words but could not assemble them into sense.

The past, I mean the real past, matters less than we pretend.

At thee seaside all is narrow horizontals, the world reduced to a few long straight lines pressed between earth and sky.

Tendo a non fare molto caso alle altre persone – l'ho già detto in precedenza, è uno dei miei difetti più gravi – e nelle rare occasioni in cui metto la testa fuori dal guscio e do una bella occhiata, quello che mi colpisce in modo strabiliante non è quanto siano diversi da me, ma quanto siano simili, malgrado tutto.

And anyway, who's to say that what we see when we're drunk is not reality, and the sober world a bleared phantasmagoria