Quotes About Perspective

all thoughts, no matter how altruistic, always end up being self-centred in some way if you give them long enough

Joyce, you know you can't pick a fight with everyone who has something to say about us, don't you?' 'I know,' she whispered into the darkness. 'There's too many of them, and not enough hours in the day.' 'It's funny,' said Hubert. 'Until me came to this country me went my whole life thinking me was just plain old Hubert Bird and then me come and find that actually me the devil himself.

Mike Greenberg

Thich Nhat Hanh writes that one of our biggest faults is to fail to celebrate not having a toothache. The idea goes something like this: We all know how painful and irritating it can be to have a toothache, and we all suffer when we do, but why is it we never take time to think how nice it is not to have a toothache?

I try to treat each evening and weekend as little slices of retirement because no one is guaranteed a lengthy one at the end of their career.

Never go into user research to prove a point, and never create goals that seek to justify a position or reinforce a perspective. The process should aim to uncover what people really want and how they really are, not whether an opinion (whether yours or a stakeholder's) is correct

To "see both sides" of a problem is the surest way to prevent its complete solution. Because there are always more than two sides. —Idries Shah, REFLECTIONS

He put the x-ray up on the light screen: The tumor was a large white circle in the middle of the picture. It looked like a headlight coming straight at me, full-speed ahead.

I can't say 'why me,' Brady. That's one of the big no-can-do's. Because if I do that now that bad stuff has happened to me, why didn't I say it about all the amazing stuff that happened to me before?

Happy people have just as much pain as anyone else, in some cases more. It could even be argued that the happy feel pain more acutely than the unhappy, whose feelings are relatively numb. The real difference in happy people is that they're not trapped by their pain. Rather than settling inside a happy soul, pain moves through it as through a channel, and that channel is joy. Joy keeps pain moving.

Of course, it is almost always the case that the couple has much more in common than they may suppose. But marriage seems to specialize, at times, in radically de-emphasizing the similarities between the partners and wildly exaggerating the points of difference.

what I found difficult was the mixture of finger pointing and sanctimony in the whole piece, your righteous standpoint over the material, I wasn't so sure about that

some things are so awful, you can't look them square in the face and some things make no sense no matter what angle you look at them from. and of course they happen in other people's lives, never in your own.

I did not say it was true, only that I believe it.

To me, sadness and humor aren't disrelated and humor is the best tool I've had against the sadness in my life.

Being a good Hans Haacke student, part of his influence on me is that there's no difference between a gallery show and a film - or even an ad and a T-shirt-in terms of cultural legitimacy. They're just different contexts in which to have some sort of communication.

Our good fortunes allowed us to feel a sadness our parents didn't have time for, and a happiness that I never saw with them.

La sabiduría es la habilidad para interpretar una situación a través de los ojos de Dios.

Sometimes our jobs as teachers is not to open their minds. Sometimes we have to thaw them.

While Canada and America did not become one country, we became like two brothers who live in the same duplex. The Canadians have the drafty top floor; the Americans have the preferred ground floor, the fun floor, so fun that they often forget that somebody is living upstairs, us.

Limitations are inspiring: they lead to thinking, so I don't mind them.

I once asked her, after reading a Dixie cup riddle, "What's worse than finding a worm in an apple?" The cup's answer was "Finding half a worm in an apple." My grandma Rosie's answer? "Having someone shove an umbrella up your tuchis . . . and then open it.

A few years later, my wife and I were visiting Iran. Why? Because our idea of a vacation is most people's idea of a hostage situation. If refugees want to get out of a place, we want to go there.

You are the sky. Everything else–it's just the weather. PEMA CHÖDRÖN, BUDDHIST