Quotes About Perspective

I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.

In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up to, what they were doing, why they were doing it. They never moved me in the way that one is moved by true poetry.

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.

People move forward into the future out of the way they comprehend the past. When we don't understand something in our past, we are therefore crippled.

Bright was the light of my last martini on my moral horizon

The first key, put in a sentence, has been this: that our "evils" are never the happenings in themselves, but the effect we allow them to have on us. No matter whether objectively an experience is apparently good or evil, subjectively, to the one who fears and doubts, all is evil; to the one who trusts, all is good.

Commonplaces never become tiresome. It is we who become tired when we cease to be curious and appreciative. We find that it is not a new scene which is needed, but a new viewpoint.

First of all, Saddam did not win the war, even though he says he did, I mean, you know, that's a joke and everybody in the world knows it.

Stay a dreamer, and you'll never have your dream; get down in the nitty-gritty, and when you get your dream you see what horseshit it was in the first place.

Los Pilotos tienen un concepto muy exagerado de su propia importancia, pensó D'mahl. ¿Y en qué los convierte eso? - Tres... dos... uno... En seres humanos.

Who was really the cop-out, Jack who went and got what he needed to make his dream real, molding a Jack Barron reality to the shape of his dreams, or me, shaping dreams to the size of mundane reality

How you think about a problem is more important than the problem itself - so always think positively.

The trouble with most of us is that we'd rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism.

The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism

Our happiness depends on the habit of mind we cultivate.

Anyway, who in their right mind would ever say a person was supposed to be happy? In your life happiness is either cut to your length or isn't.

A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send checks to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.

Honest critics are continually finding blind spots in their taste: they discover the possibility of recognizing a valid form of poetic experience without being able to realize it for themselves.

In this perspective what I like or don't like disappears, because there's nothing left of me as a separate person: as a reader of literature I exist only as a representative of humanity as a whole. We

For instance," said the boy again, "if Christmas trees were people and people were Christmas trees, we'd all be chopped down, put up in the living room, and covered in tinsel, while the trees opened our presents." "What does that have to do with it?" asked Milo. "Nothing at all," he answered, "but it's an interesting possibility, don't you think?

Things which are equally bad are also equally good. Try to look at the bright side of things. - Humbug

What if the last seventy-five years has been the exception rather than the rule? What if the last three-quarters of a century has lulled us into believing that the next few decades will continue on the same path? What if we have forgotten the lessons of history from a century ago? In the first four decades of the twentieth century, we faced World War I, then the deadly Spanish flu of 1918–19, then deglobalization and bouts of hyperinflation, and then the Great Depression.

To become properly acquainted with a truth, we must first have disbelieved it, and disputed against it.

One should, when overwhelmed by the shadow of a giant, move aside and see if the colossal shadow isn't merely that of a pygmy blocking out the sun.