Quotes About Perspective

We should beware of the errors of judging eras and places according to the prevailing standards of here and now.

I do believe that as we travel through life we become a different person in every situation, or context, or phase.

We know nothing worth knowing about what goes on outside our frontiers. Worse-we know very little more about what goes on within them. Beyond the light of one's own personal experience-darkness. What are people thinking? What are they feeling? How do they behave? Messages of reassurance or exhortation come through. One reads between the lines. Friends pool their knowledge. But in general we live like animals, in ignorance of the world around us.

Not your view, I know—you'd be happy to describe what you were up to purely in differential equations if you could—" Excerpt From: Michael Frayn. "Copenhagen".

I shatter the objective universe around you—and all you can say is that there's an error in the formulation!" Excerpt From: Michael Frayn. "Copenhagen".

Adversity does more than build character. It changes the way we see the world.

Wilde's definition of a cynic (someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing), and

Now looking across my latte at this confident smiling Starbucks employee I felt sorry for myself. She seemed carefree to me so young so full of options. Later I would learn that she had seen more hardship in her life than I could conceive of having seen in three lifetimes.

Frederick II of Prussia (known as "the Great," reigned 1740–1786) famously ran his Berlin court—and the associated Academy of Sciences—in French. When Voltaire visited in 1750, he wrote to the Marquis de Thibouville that "I find myself here in France. One speaks only our language. German is for the soldiers and for the horses; it is only necessary on the road."187f

Did she herself even believe in God anymore? Why argue over a phantom? They were two fools arguing over lies.

If I have a style, I am not aware of it.

The dialogue of architecture has been centered too long around the idea of truth.

We cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

All movies assault the viewer in one way or another.

Mainstream cinema raises questions only to immediately provide an answer to them, so they can send the spectator home reassured. If we actually had those answers, then society would appear very different from what it is.

Samuel McDermott or not, I was Ian McDermott, and the way I saw life was the way I'd live life.

Anthropologists teach others to try to avoid the pitfalls of ethnocentrism by learning to understand a culture in terms of its own assumptions about reality. Western shamans can do a similar service with regard to cognicentrism. The anthropologists' lesson is called cultural relativism. What Western shamans can try to create, to some degree, is cognitive relativism.

For most of my life, I've always been the youngest one at the table, and it's something I've come to expect, maybe take for granted.

make that client the hero, not yourself.

There was a famous story, some reporters asked a door gunner, "How can you shoot women and children?" and he'd answered, "It's easy, you just don't lead 'em so much."

you could also hear the other, some young soldier speaking in all bloody innocence, saying, 'All that's just a load, man. We're here to kill gooks. Period.' Which wasn't at all true of me. I was there to watch.

And I know, because I've been there, that there is a hellworld where you're always expected to have an opinion about everything all the time: a judgment, a take - a 'view,' in the most ordinary sense of the word.

There is no such thing as a weekend, and you don't live for your holidays

Auschwitz was a much safer place to be than Dresden or any other city of any size in Germany from 1943 onward.