Quotes About Perspective

I had spent the New Year's Day of old men, who differ on that day from their juniors, not because people have ceased to give them presents but because they themselves have ceased to believe in the New Year.

Well, how could a reader notice that? There may be something lacking there I admit. But heavens above, they ought to count themselves lucky! It's full enough of good things as it is, far more than they usually get.

myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V

Anzi, da un punto di vista puramente realistico, i paesi che noi desideriamo tengono in ogni istante assai più posto nella nostra esistenza vera, dei paesi dove abitiamo in realtà.

the objects which we admire have no absolute value in themselves...

An impression of love is out of proportion to the other impressions of life, but when it is lost in their midst we are incapable of appreciating it.

When you come to live with a woman, you will soon cease to see anything of what made you love; though it is true that the two sundered elements can be reunited by jealousy.

I fatti non penetrano nel mondo in cui vivono le nostre convinzioni, non le hanno create e non possono distruggerle. Possono infliggere loro continue smentite senza appannarle.

But in exchange for what our imagination leads us to expect and we give ourselves so much futile trouble trying to find, life gives us something which we were very far from imagining.

I did not distinguish the successive theories of which that uncertainty was composed any more than, when we watch a horse running, we isolate the successive positions of its body as they appear upon a bioscope. But

People often say that, by pointing out to a man the faults of his mistress, you succeed only in strengthening his atachment to her, because he does not believe you.

For a young man has strong imagination but poor judgment, so that he imagines others to be as big as he is but considers himself to be very small. He has unbounded trust in the universe but is constantly unsure of himself.

But then, even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people.

Whenever she saw in others an advantage, however trivial, which she herself lacked, she would persuade herself that it was no advantage at all, but a drawback, and would pity so as not to have to envy them. "I

The universe is real for us all and dissimilar to each one of us.

there was no need for him to hasten towards the attainment of a happiness already captured and held in a safe place, which would not escape his grasp again.

With the wisdom of people not in love who believe a man of sense should be unhappy only over a person who is worth it; which is rather like being surprised that anyone should condescend to suffer from cholera because of so small a creature as the comma bacillus.

In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self.

The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another.

I never much like thus being told without possibility of reply what I am to think about people whom I know.

Well, well, what I always say is, one should never argue about plays or novels. Everyone has his own way of looking at things, and what may be horrible to you is, perhaps, just what I like best.

We believe that we may change things around us to suit our desires, we believe this because otherwise we can see no acceptable solution. We do not think of the solution which occurs most frequently and which is also acceptable: when we do not manage to change things to suit our desires, but our desires gradually change. We become indifferent to a situation which we had hoped to change when we found it unbearable.

We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness that no one else can take for us, that no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.

Sentimos en un mundo, pensamos y nombramos en otro