Quotes About Perspective

Once, [Rabbi Chanoch] Teller was traveling with 16 of his [18] offspring ... while changing planes in Frankfurt, Teller noticed a German woman gaping. 'Are all of these your children?' the woman asked. 'From one wife?' 'Yes, God has blessed me with all these children,' the rabbi replied. 'Haven't you heard about the population problem?'the woman sniffed. 'How many more children do you want to have?' Rabbi Teller paused and looked the woman in the eye: 'About 6 million,' he said.

Knowledge of history frees us to be contemporary.

[T]he historian lays humanity on the couch.

Do not worry about your problems with mathematics, I assure you mine are far greater. Albert Einstein.

Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect," Madison told Bradford, writing with the authority of a man who knew firsthand the price of being bound to a received viewpoint—and the liberation of breaking free.

Maybe hallucinations are just another reality that we don't see most of the time

Things aren't always as they seem. But then, sometimes they're exactly as they seem.

I gradually slid into believing my quieter, less visible life could not possibly matter as much as his. What was important was to keep Bill going, make his life manageable, facilitate his ministry.

Although we perceive science as an ultimate truth, science is finally just a story, told in installments.

We create space and time on the surface of our retinas.

In Europe, Murrow observed to his wife, people were dying and "a thousand years of civilization [were] being smashed" while America remained on the sidelines. How could one possibly be objective or neutral about that?

There was no bombing of the U.S. mainland, no civilian casualties, no destruction of millions of homes. Indeed, while the standard of living plummeted for the vast majority of Britons during the war, many if not most Americans lived better than ever before.

and one who has not lived through it could never believe what happened.

Maybe the grass is greener on the other side depends who was standing in it. Sometimes you have to go over there and look.

She was thinking that the grass really could be greener on the other side of the fence. It depended on who wa standing in the grass. Maybe you had to go take a look

I tried to think whether I had ever had a great adventure. I decided that I had. It's all in how you look at it.

But living amid so many words, I overestimated their power and breadth. The world does not turn on words alone; it only seems to if the eye and mind are saturated with them.

There are people who embrace the Oxford comma and people who don't, and I'll just say this: never get between these people when drink has been taken.

There are people who embrace the Oxford comma and those who don't, and I'll just say this: never get between these people when drink has been taken.

Manners are about imagination, ultimately. They are about imagining being the other person.

Money itself isn't the problem. Money itself isn't bad or good. Money itself doesn't have power or not have power. It is our interpretation of money, our interaction with it, where the real mischief is and where we find the real opportunity for self-discovery and personal transformation.

Myths and superstitions have power over us only to the extent that we believe them, but when we believe, we live completely under their spell

In our relationship with money, more is better distracts us from living more mindfully and richly with what we have.

Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we're already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds race with a litany of what we didn't get, or didn't get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to that reverie of lack.