Quotes About Perspective

lack of imagination is not itself an argument.

One thing that will quickly become clear is that the prevalent 'big picture' of history – shared by modern-day followers of Hobbes and Rousseau alike – has almost nothing to do with the facts.

From a world-historical perspective, it seems much more sensible to see Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as three different manifestations of the same great Western intellectual tradition

When I lived in Madagascar, I found that rural people—who had little use for clocks—still often described distance the old-fashioned way and said that to walk to another village would take two cookings of a pot of rice. In medieval Europe, people spoke similarly of something as taking "three paternosters," or two boilings of an egg. This sort of thing is extremely common. In places without clocks, time is measured by actions rather than action being measured by time.

One must simplify the world to discover something new about it. The problem comes when, long after the discovery has been made, people continue to simplify.

one man's right is simply another's obligation.

the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.

This is our story, and we're not sticking to it.

Science has repeatedly revealed to us that we are not unique or special — except, guess what. We are.

for the first time ever the majority of children being born today will never in their lives directly see the Milky Way galaxy. The cosmic connection has never been closer or more remote. Age

The modelers are starting to map out the possible climate states of exoplanets. I've participated in some workshops about this and have found it fascinating watching astronomers and terrestrial climate modelers try to talk to one another. There is a huge gulf in scale and perspective. Our knowledge of exoplanets is so sparse. Each of these worlds is known to us as, at best, a few numbers: mass, distance from a star, and in some cases vague inferences about temperature

His questions led me to comprehend that I had a rare treasure: life experience.

Of course. And you said I was one of a kind, and that if I cried 'cause of them, then you see it upside down, and it's like I'm laughing 'cause of me.

We write. How fortunate we are: The world does not close in on us. The world does not grow smaller.

Look on the bright side. Even though America's Wokey-Woke police cannot issue arrest warrants for real or imagined transgressors from the pages of history, they still have the New York Times willing to do a little front-page strangling on their behalf.

To persevere is always a reflection of the state of one's inner life, one's philosophy and one's perspective.

To persevere is always a reflection of the state of one's inner life, one's philosophy and one's perspective

He had seen the insides of jaggedly ripped-open dead people. He knew, for instance, what brains looked like spilling out of somebody's head. In the context of this, much of what went on in normal life seemed wholly and disturbingly ridiculous.

one understands nothing psychological unless one has experienced it oneself.

The Master leads by emptying people's minds and filling their cores, by weakening their ambition and toughening their resolve. He helps people lose everything they know, everything they desire, and creates confusion in those who think that they know.

What is 'healthy' for one dominant ego-image at a particular stage of life may be decidedly unhealthy for the nascent ego-image of the next stage of life.

Memory is often less about the truth than about what we want it to be.

He was "more passionate than most intelligent men, and more intelligent and reasoned than most passionate men.

He was very good, it turned out, at outlining the flaws in the government as long as someone else was in charge of the government.