Quotes About Perspective

O]nce you can read, you can no longer open a book and see a jumble of letters; after you get to know someone's face, you can't see her as a stranger.

don't want to make photographs. The way you described it with Capa's work is exactly right: I want to make windows.

We are products of our culture and interpret the world through our mental conditioning.

What you see as a crisis, God sees as an opportunity for growth. What you see as humiliating, He sees as an occasion for the development of humble leadership. It is all in how you see it. What is your perspective?

At least I could read, count, and pray the catechism. I thought this made me lucky, but in other ways, it made me poor, like a pocket turned inside out, empty of coins.

Life is a journey, not a destination. Enjoy every step of the way.

In the Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, the reader tries to reconstruct the past through participants and witnesses to that past, but what results is a blurred, ambiguous fiction within another fiction that recounts past events in accord with individual perspectives and interests. In this case, reality becomes fiction not only because the novelist fictionalized it but because the acts of remembering are so deformed or willfully mendacious that it is itself a fiction.

by knowing a few people well, I know the whole world, for human nature is the same the world over and does not change. Having only a drop of water, a microscope, and a dream, I fashion from it the sea. I know it, perhaps, as he does not, who only crosses it in a ship.

Yes, I thought, now I see the earth as it really is; never again will I see things as I saw them yesterday or the day before.

All history involves selection, and it is always human beings who do the selecting.

Things aren't always what they seem, are they?

The day of death is better than the day of birth, a live dog is better than a dead lion, and the grave is better than poverty.

there is a sense in which literacy actually distorts the archeological record, for while it illuminates the centers of civilization, it makes the darkness surrounding even darker.

Hope is what you get when you suddenly realize that a different worldview is possible, a worldview in which the rich, the powerful, and the unscrupulous do not after all have the last word.

Like the Hindu in Belfast who was asked whether he was a Catholic Hindu or a Protestant Hindu, those of us who follow this fresh reading of the New Testament want to say to our critics right and left, 'Don't imagine that because we don't check all your fundamentalist boxes, we must be modernists, or that because we don't check all your modernist boxes, we must be fundamentalists.

Beauty matters, dare I say, almost as much as spirituality and justice.

believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

If the promised final future is simply that immortal souls will have left behind their mortal bodies, why then death still rules - since that is a description, not of the defeat of death, but simply of death itself, seen from a different angle.

heaven is undoubtedly important, but it's not the end of the world.

The reason history is fascinating is because people in other times and places are so like us. The reason history is difficult is because people in other times and places are so different from us. History is, to that extent, like marriage

Jews too, have assumed otherwise (suggesting, for instance, that Paul the Apostle was a traitor to the Jewish world or that he had never really understood it in the first place), the point is worth stressing before we even approach the main work of Paul's life.

It Isn't actually much of an encouragement to me to read the stories about Jesus. I might as well take encouragement from watching a great athlete run a four-minute mile. Sure, it's a fine sight, but at my age and with my weight I would be lucky to do a mile in 10 minutes, let alone four. I can watch a ballet dancer on stage with great delight, not because I can copy him, but precisely because I know I can't.

there is no such thing as a god's-eye view (by which would be meant a Deist god's-eye view) available to human beings, a point of view which is no human's point of view.

Saying "It's true for you" sounds fine and tolerant. But it only works because it's twisting the word "true" to mean, not "a true revelation of the way things are in the real world," but "something that is genuinely happening inside you.