Quotes About Perspective

The answer to that is complicated." "Give me the short version." "The short version is 'Yes, but.' The slightly longer version is 'No, and.' Which version would you like?

There were more than a few scientists who knew one little thing, and then thought that knowledge was universally applicable to every other problem, to the point of excluding or discounting information from people whose specialty was that other problem.

You strike me as a 'glass half-empty' kind of guy, sir," he said. "I'm a 'the glass is half-empty and filled with poison' kind of guy, actually," Wilson said.

You can't afford anthropomorphic biases when some of the aliens most like us would rather make human hamburgers than peace.

I was getting away with something in my own way. But then I get here and saw you, brain-dead and with tubes coming out of every part of your body. And I realized I wasn't getting away with anything. Just like you didn't get away with anything. You were just born, fucked around for a while, got hit by a car and died, and that's your whole life story right there. You don't win by getting through all you life not having done anything.

Yes, that. You're feeling cognitive dissonance, Jamie. Two contradictory-yet-entirely-valid-within-their-contexts thoughts about the same subject. And humans hate that shit. We hate it so much. The worst answer for us for anything is, 'It depends.

You can be happy anywhere, if you have the right point of view. And the ability to ignore the smell of an entire planet.

Then you're seventy-five, friends are dead, and you've replaced at least one major organ: you have to pee four times a night, and you can't go up a flight a stairs without being little winded -- and your're told you're in pretty good shape for your age. [....], in a decade you'll be eighty-five, and the only difference between you and a raisin will be that while you're both wrinkled and without a prostate, the raisin never had a prostate to begin with.

I live the life I live, and it's the only life I have. No one else is out there in the universe living my alternate lives, and even if they were, I wouldn't be worrying about them because I have my life to live here, now.

You're all so busy tending to your own personal tree that you don't look around to see that the forest is on fire.

words themselves are action; they do not simply describe the world but in a very real sense make the world. Therefore it makes sense to pay attention to the worlds people are attempting to create in their words.

The short version is 'Yes, but.' The slightly longer version is 'No, and.' Which version would you like?

Humans, being intermediary creatures in both time and space, did not fully appreciate the value of life at every physical and temporal scale.

A newspaper publisher. In the late 1800s the United States and Spain were warming up for a war over Cuba, and Hearst sent an illustrator to Cuba to make pictures of the event. When the illustrator got there, he sent a telegram to Hearst saying that as far as he could see, there was no war coming and that he was going home. Hearst sent back that he should stay and said, 'You furnish the pictures, and I will furnish the war.' And he did.

I don't discount that in the end, everything I do, say, write and am will amount to a whole lot of not much; I just don't think it's a relevant metric. The relevant metric is: Have I constructed a life that gives me happiness, allows me to give happiness, and allows for this life to have meaning within its admittedly limited context? If I am succeeding in this particular metric, I think I'm doing pretty well.

The next day, I got shot in the head. Before that happened, though, I fell out of my bunk. The falling out of the bunk was not the important part.

I don't appreciate the suggestion that I'm acting irrationally," he said. "Then don't act irrationally

sooner or later, everything simply becomes daily life. When Haden's first struck, it was the most important news story of the century. Everyone knew it. Everyone felt it. But then it just… became part of the fabric of the American story, day in and day out.

There is a saying along the lines of not trying to teach a pig to sing because it wastes your time and annoys the pig. I want you to know how many times I have stood in pig-filled rooms, and longed to annoy. I

But my writing won't ever reflect the diversity that literature in general should be capable of. You need writers whose lives are not like mine for that.

the most important days of your existence don't always announce themselves in obvious ways.

How do you feel?" "I have a headache," Lee said. "My muscles are sore. I am dying of thirst. I have to pee. I am restrained. I'm blind. How are you?" "Better than you, I will admit

Are you saying you expected us to fail?" Berkeley asked. "I'm saying I have an appreciation for the fact that plans are plans

I find some amusement at the idea of you as a child, of you reaching no higher than my waist, of you big-eyed, and your big head wobbly on your neck, looking at the world with curiosity if not comprehension, needing to wait years to know enough to know how little you know.