Quotes About Perspective

It's the compass; not just the little head ruling the big head, though that's part of it. It's the natural instinct of following your heart, your eyes, to move from place to place, country to country, and do what you feel inside, to find out what you feel inside. How can you find yourself if you stay in your country of birth? It's important, vital, to stand aside and take a look from a different angle, to look with a fresh pair of eyes.

We tend to overvalue the things we can measure and undervalue the things we cannot.

So when I tell you what I think, I am not transferring thoughts to you. I do not lose them when I tell them. I express what I think, and for you to understand, you need not think what I think, or have the same thought as I. You may need to know what I think and to say it, but not to have the thought or think it.

When we think language is on one side and reality is on the other, and then puzzle as to how they link up, we forget that we dwell in language and are merely imagining that we can point at them.

My prevailing interest has been in the world as a whole, and in the place of a person in a larger setting than one defined by national boundaries.

And now that I think back, I realize the real gap between us lay in the fact that I, who was so proud of coming from the swift-winged world of science, was laughing at an old world where it was possible seriously to believe that men die young of the bad habit of failing to go out on a dangerous river to gaze at the earth when it turns overnight into silver.

I have very little," he said, and he spoke as if having little were the greatest fortune, and the greatest buffer against the future, that a man could wish.

At some point I asked her if she was at peace with the idea of dying. She looked at me like I was stupid and insane. "No," she said. "I want to live." You idiot! would have finished the sentence nicely. It was one of the only times she seemed really disappointed in me. I realized I had learned everything I know about death from movies. There is no peace in dying.

cat's feelings, and neither do you. It is not your pet anymore. It is an asshole who lives with you.

The delusion lies in the fact that no matter how well we think we know the Other, we still judge from within the imprisoning framework of our own limited cultural criteria, we still speak within the cliché of the stereotype." That

I knew, and every black man there knew, that I, as a man now white once again, could say the things that needed saying but would be rejected if black men said them.

If we could only put ourselves in the shoes of others to see how we would react, then we might become aware of the injustice of discrimination and the tragic inhumanity of every kind of prejudice.

measure up - disillusion us by showing

The hardest thing about being a writer is convincing your wife that lying on the sofa is work.

At that age, it feels as good to feel bad as it does to feel good.

Logic is relative.

How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.

I have learned that the consequences of our past actions are always interesting; I have learned to view the present with a forward-looking eye.

Being wrong about important things is exhausting.

there is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old…

The lie, of course, is more interesting.

In the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy. Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.

Don't get your balls crossed about it.

Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy.