Quotes About Perspective

Kohei Goshi, the 81 year old founder of the Japan Productivity Center, our host in Japan, said, "Americans are very good at inventing, but we may be better at raising a baby.

Happiness is the resultant of the relative strengths of positive and negative feelings rather than an absolute amount of one or the other.

What was most significant about the lunar voyage was not that men set foot on the moon but that they set eye on the earth.

We are wide-eyed in contemplating the possibility that life may exist elsewhere in the universe, but we wear blinders when contemplating the possibilities of life on earth.

The control center of your life is your attitude.

The way a book is read- which is to say, the qualities a reader brings to a book- can have as much to do with its worth as anything the author puts into it.

Reconstructing the past is rather like translating poetry. It can be done, but never exactly.

Shall I give you my recipe for happiness? I find everything useful and nothing indispensable. I find everything wonderful and nothing miraculous. I reverence the body. I avoid first causes like the plague.

The longer one lives, the more one realizes that nothing is a dish for every day.

The older I get," observed Mr. van Koppen, "the more I realize that everything depends upon what a man postulates. The rest is plain sailing.

A man can believe a considerable deal of rubbish, and yet go about his daily work in a rational and cheerful manner.

Everybody overstates his case, particularly when he is anxious to do something which he considers useful.

Real empathy requires that we develop the capacity to put our own concerns aside long enough to notice what someone else is going through internally, without reference to ourselves.

What makes us miserable, what causes us to be in conflict with one another? It's our insistence on our particular view of things. Our view of what we deserve or want, our view of right and wrong, our view of self, of other, of life, of death. But views are just views. They're not ultimate truth.

Everything inspires me; sometimes I think I see things others don't.

Whenever I see he/him or she/her, I think fuck/you. You must be living an awfully precious life if, amid the pervasive despair of an economy in free fall, your uppermost concern is clinging to your pronouns.

Do not compare" is the mantra of moral blackmailers.

For Du Bois, there was no such thing as an a priori wrong conclusion; there was only a conclusion proven wrong.

A skeptic once said to me, 'I don't believe the Bible because it has miracles.' I said, 'Name one.' He said, 'Turning water into wine. Do you believe that?' I said, 'Yeah, it happens all the time.' He said, 'What do you mean?' I said, 'Well, rain goes through the grapevine up into the grape, and the grape turns into wine. All Jesus did was speed it up a little bit.

A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.

But it also became the experience, or was the experience, of the writers who were attracted to this kind of humor. They're all men or women who come from the same kind of experience in their own lives.

One is reminded of the adage that whether elephants fight or make love, the grass gets trampled.

Sharks are more "natural" than life rafts-at least according to vulgar understanding-but, if forced to dive off a sinking ship and swim for my life, I'd rather meet a life raft than a shark! I daresay that radical environmentalists would share this view if the choice were actually forced upon them.2

It is quite likely that a medieval European would decry our own culture in such terms for its failure to venerate the Blessed Virgin with sufficient fervor. Indeed, a wellbred Aztec would doubtless find us odd and emotionally stunted in our deplorable lack of enthusiasm for massive orgies of human sacrifice. We must therefore ask, in good cultural relativist fashion, whether Kellert is merely glorifying his own intense prejudices by describing them as human universals.