Quotes About Perspective

As Hamlet said to Rosencrantz, "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

So, you see? Sometimes regrets aren't based on fact at all. Sometimes regrets are just . . .' She searched for the appropriate term and found it. 'A load of bullshit.

40 pieces of helpful advice: No. 31 - Three in the morning is never the time to try and sort out your life.

The future isn't real. The future is abstract. The now is all we know. One now after another now. The now is where we must live. There are billions of different versions of an older you. There is one version of the present you. Focus on that.

The way out of your mind is via the world.

There are as many versions of a book as there are readers.

When you stay too long in one place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person.

it would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunize you against sadness. And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can't have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities. But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you're in.

an ordinary life is not a guarantee of happiness.

the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn't the place, but the perspective.

Everything we need is here, if we give up thinking we need everything.

I feel the sheer unfathomable marvel that is this strange life we have, here on earth, the seven billion of us, clustered in our towns and cities on this pale blue dot of a planet, spending our allotted 30,000 days as best we can, in glorious insignificance.

She realized that you could be as honest as possible in life, but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality.

Humans, in the day that has been the Earth, have been here for less than a minute. We're a late-night piss in the toilet, that's all we are.

To believe in the things we feel at that point is wrong, because those feelings would disappear with food or sleep.

When really success isn't something you measure, and life isn't a race you can win. It's all . . . bollocks, actually . . .

It was depressing that he found it so much easier to question his sanity than my reality.

It's hard to predict, isn't? The things that will make us happy

What sometimes feels like a trap is actually just a trick of the mind.

Don't think your work matters more than it does.

Don't be proud of only liking realism. It is like being proud of not having an imagination.

We can't tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.

But she'd been feeling lonely. And though she'd studied enough existential philosophy to believe loneliness was a fundamental part of being a human in an essentially meaningless universe, it was good to see him.

It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn't the place, but the perspective. And the most peculiar discovery Nora made was that, of all the extremely divergent variations of herself she had experienced, the most radical sense of change happened within the exact same life.