Quotes About Perspective

O que chamamos nossa conduta permanece ignorado de nosso mais próximo vizinho; o que esquecemos haver dito, ou que até nunca dissemos, vai provocar hilaridade até num outro planeta, e a imagem que os outros formam de nossos gestos e atitudes tampouco se parece com a que nós próprios formamos, como um desenho, um decalque malfeito, e onde ora a um traço negro corresponde um espaço vazio, e a um branco, um contorno inexplicável.

It is only with the passions of others that we are ever really familiar, and that we come to find out about our own can be no more than what other people have shewn us.

it was the moment in which a sane man who is talking to a lunatic has not yet perceived that his companion is mad

it was like what used to be called a panopticon but a panopticon of years, a view not of a monument but of a person situated in the modifying perspective of Time.

But one reads the papers as one wants to with a bandage over one's eyes without trying to understand the facts, listening to the soothing words of the editor as to the words of one's mistress. We are beaten and happy because we believe ourselves unbeaten and victorious

A large part of what we believe to be true (and this applies even to our final conclusions) with a persistence equalled only by our sincerity, springs from an original misconception of our premisses.

So that we always see as young those we knew young and those whom we knew as old people we embellish retrospectively with the virtues of old age,

Our parallel lives resemble paths bordered at intervals by flower-vases placed symmetrically but not facing each other.

Perhaps the immobility of the things around us is imposed on them by our certainty that they are themselves and not others, by the immobility of our mind confronting them.

Acontece que os diversos períodos da nossa vida vêm assim cruzar-se uns com os outros. Por causa de uma coisa que queremos hoje e amanhã nos será indiferente, negamo-nos a ver outra coisa que agora nada nos diz, mas que haveremos de querer mais adiante, e que, se houvéssemos consentido em vê-la, talvez tivéssemos desejado antes, abreviando assim as nossas dores atuais, se bem que na verdade para substituí-las por outras.

He who is in the wrong believes himself in the right, as was the case with Germany, and he who is in the right supports it with arguments which only appear irrefutable to him because they respond to his anger.

Without inquiring too deeply into the causes which make it possible to find subjects of gaiety always close at hand, the proof of that possibility can be found in the fact that persons of sensitive intelligence are capable of finding comic potentialities in everything and everybody, thereby demonstrating that if some people hold the belief that there is very little that is laughable in the world, the reason is that they lack the ability to find it.

But, just as we do not possess that sense of direction with which certain birds are endowed, so we lack the sense of our own visibility as we lack that of distances, imagining as quite close to us the interested attention of the people who on the contrary never give us a thought, and not suspecting that we are at the same time the sole preoccupation of others.

The hierophant was not even conscious of my absence. When he heard of it, he was distressed: "What, you didn't see me carving the turkeys myself?" I replied that having failed, so far, to see Rome, Venice, Siena, the Prado, the Dresden gallery, the Indies, Sarah in Phèdre, I had learned to resign myself, and that I would add his carving of turkeys to my list.

Mamma was the first person who had given her the pleasure of feeling that her peasant existence, with its simple joys and sorrows, might offer some interest, might be a source of grief or pleasure to some one other than herself. My

Chaque fois qu'elle voyait aux autres un avantage si petit fût-il qu'elle n'avait pas, elle se persuadait que c'était non un avantage mais un mal et les plaignait pour ne pas avoir à les envier.

We consider it innocent to desire a thing and atrocious that the other person should desire it.

Time serves us powerfully by adding its influence to purely intellectual affinities; it is the passage of time that causes us to forget our antipathies, our contempts, and the very causes which gave birth to them.

For the very ones who are right, like Françoise, have also to be wrong, so that Justice becomes an impossibility

But the old lady on the contrary, far from justifying her daughter's fears, felt every time someone of her own age "disappeared" that she had gained a victory in a contest against formidable competitors.

The reason why life may be judged to be trivial, although at certain moments to us, it seems so beautiful, is that we form our judgement ordinarily, not on the evidence of life itself, but of the mental images which preserve nothing of life and therefore, we judge it disparagingly.

Aunque nada cambie, si yo cambio, todo cambia.

Les faits ne pénètrent pas dans le monde où vivent nos croyances, ils n'ont pas fait naître celles-ci, ils ne les détruisent pas.

In actual fact, his nature was really like a sheet of paper in which so many folds have been made in every direction that it is impossible to know where you are.