Quotes About Perspective

A man is not what he thinks he is, but what he thinks, he is.

The world according to Heidegger is like a prep school for Calvinists.

When we cannot obtain a thing, we comfort ourselves with the reassuring thought that it is not worth nearly as much as we believed.

To the believer, truths are a settled thing, a fact; to the freethinker, a thing that is still to be settled.

It is entirely correct and completely in order to say, "You can't do anything with philosophy." The only mistake is to believe that with this, the judgment concerning philosophy is at an end. For a little epilogue arises in the form of a counter-question: even if we can't do anything with it, may not philosophy in the end do something with us, provided that we engage ourselves with it?

An attitude of moral indifference has no connection with scientific "objectivity".

The task of the teacher is to serve the students with his knowledge and scientific experience and not to imprint upon them his personal political views.

Happiness always looks small while you hold it in your hands, but let it go, and you learn at once how big and precious it is.

You must write for children in the same way as you do for adults, only better.

You can't eat straight A's.

The difference between mad people and sane people . . . is that sane people have variety when they talk-story. Mad people have only one story that they talk over and over.

It must be that people who read go on more macrocosmic and microcosmic trips – biblical god trips, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Ulysses, Finnegan's Wake trips. Non-readers, what do they get? (They get the munchies.)

When we're young we have faith in what is seen, but when we're old we know that what is seen is traced in air and built on water.

What the devil's a king but a man, or a queen but a woman?

If you intend to insist on justice in order to live a successful and happy life, you will not do so in this lifetime, on this planet.

I have found that one of the commonest causes of unhappiness among my patients is that they are attempting to live their lives on the deferred payment plan. They do not live, or enjoy life now, but wait for some future event or occurrence. They will be happy when they get married, when they get a better job, when they get the house paid for, when they get the children through college, when they have completed some task or won some victory. Invariably, they are disappointed.

You act, and feel, not according to what things are really like, but according to the image your mind holds of what they are like. You have certain mental images of yourself, your world, and the people around you, and you behave as though these images were the truth, the reality, rather than the things they represent.

The measure of mental health is the disposition to find good everywhere. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Happiness is simply "a state of mind in which our thinking is pleasant a good share of the time.

Ideas are changed, not by will, but by other ideas

An automatic guidance system corrects its course from negative feedback data. It acknowledges errors in order to correct them and stay on course. So must you. Admit your mistakes and errors, but don't cry over them. Correct them and go forward. In dealing with other people, try to see the situation from their point of view as well as your own.

The self-image can be changed.

If you are to be happy at all, you must be happy—period! Not happy "because of.

Perhaps most important of all, we will learn how chronically unhappy people have learned to enjoy life by "experiencing" happiness!