Quotes About Perspective

It seems that worrying about growing old is a sign you are young.

It is strange how close the past is, even when you imagine it to be so far away. Strange how it can just jump out of a sentence and hit you.

No single feeling becomes the only feeling if you let it all happen. And the way to let it all happen is to see the value in it all, in everything. To see the way the dark might lead to the light and the way present pain might lead to future hope.

the way I understand my life is as a kind of Russian doll, with different versions inside other versions, each one enclosing the other, whereby the life before isn't seen from the outside but is still there.

The longer you live, the more you realise that nothing is fixed. Everyone will become a refugee if they live long enough. Everyone would realise their nationality means little in the long run. Everyone would see their worldviews challenged and disproved. Everyone would realise that the thing that defines a human being is being a human being.

So often, reading is seen as important because of its social value. It is tied to education and the economy and so on. But that misses the whole point of reading. Reading isn't important because it helps to get you a job. It's important because it gives you room to exist beyond the reality you're given. It is how humans merge; how minds connect. Dreams, empathy, understanding, escape.

Forcing yourself to see the world through love's gaze can be healthy. Love is an attitude to life. It can save us.

Always, it is smaller than you, even when it feels vast. It operates within you, you do not operate within it. It may be a dark cloud passing across the sky, but - if that is the metaphor - you are the sky. You were there before it. And the cloud can't exist without the sky, but the sky can exist without the cloud.

Nothing makes you feel smaller, more trivial, than such a vast transformation inside your own mind while the world carries on, oblivious.

They only had Saturdays, because Mondays were a little bit too close to Sundays for Sunday's liking, as if Monday were a collapsed star in the week's solar system, with an excessive gravitational pull.

Almost everything she had done in her life, she realised - almost everything she had bought and worked for and consumed - had taken her further away from understanding that she and all humans were really just one of nine million species.

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.

There are patterns to life . . . Rhythms. It is so easy, while trapped in just the one life, to imagine that times of sadness or tragedy or failure or fear are a result of that particular existence. That it is a by-product of living a certain way, rather than simply living.

And we spend so much time wishing our lives were different, comparing ourselves to other people and to other versions of ourselves, when really most lives contain degrees of good and degrees of bad.

But we kind of know that turning life into a desperate race for more stuff is only going to shorten it. Not in years, not in terms of actual time, but in terms of how time feels.

Maybe happiness is not about what we can get. Maybe happiness is about what we already have. Maybe happiness is about what we can give. Maybe happiness is not a butterfly we can catch with a net. Maybe there is no certain way to be happy. Maybe there are only maybes. If (as Emily Dickinson said) "Forever—is composed of Nows—," maybe the nows are made of maybes. Maybe the point of life is to give up certainty and to embrace life's beautiful uncertainty.

You are the observer of your mind, not its victim

You are not other people. You are you. You have no control over other people. You have no absolute control over what they think of the world or of politics or of you. You have no control over what harm they may have done. Even if the harm they have done is to you.

Andrea told me after that film that there was too much Matt Haig in Matt Haig. She was kind of joking but kind of on to something. So for me, anything that lessens that extreme sense of selfe, that makes me feel me but at a lower volume, is very welcome. (...) Travel has been one of those things.

When there is nothing we can do about something, the point of worry begins to diminish. "Everybody dies," wrote Nora Ephron." There's nothing you can do about it. Whether or not you eat six almonds a day.

You had to stay consistent to life's delusions. All you had was your perspective, so objective truth was meaningless. You had to choose a dream and stick with it. Everything else was a con.And once you had tasted truth and love in the same potent cocktail there had to be no more tricks.

Each of us has the power to enter a new world. All we have to do is change our mind.

the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment'.

Regrets ignore chronology. They float around. The sequence of these lists changes all the time.