Quotes About Perspective

She closed her eyes an instant, and the vacuous routine of the life she had chosen stretched before her like a long white road without dip or turning: it was true she was to roll over it in a carriage instead of trudging it on foot, but sometimes the pedestrian enjoys the diversion of a short cut which is denied to those on wheels.

What is truth? Where a woman is concerned, it's the story that's easiest to believe.

The whole truth?" Miss Bart laughed. "What is truth? Where a woman is concerned, it's the story that's easiest to believe.

You might as well say that the only way not to think about air is to have enough to breathe. That is true enough in a sense, but your lungs are thinking about the air if you are not. And so it is with your rich people: they may not be thinking of money, but they're breathing it all the while; take them into another element and see how they squirm and gasp!

La diferencia es que estos jovencitos dan por sentado que van a conseguir cuanto se proponen, mientras que nosotros casi siempre dábamos por sentado que no debíamos conseguirlo. Aunque me pregunto si algo que uno está seguro de conseguir le haría latir tan locamente el corazón.

Don't judge us too harshly—or not, at least, till you have taken the trouble to learn our point of view. You consider the individual—we think only of the family.

Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field.

The wild gas, the fixed air is plainly broke loose: but we ought to suspend our judgments until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agitation of the troubled and frothy surface. [Alluding to Joseph Priestley's Observations on Air]

Imaginatively challenged folks, for whom crossing a state line amounted to foreign travel, could not conceive that the gray-blue-eyes inspecting them had, over the past year, similarly scrutinized Nandi warriors, Arab mullahs, Magyar landowners, French marshals, Prussian academics, and practically every monarch or minister of consequence in Europe--not to mention the maquettes in Rodin's studio, and whatever dark truths flickered in the gaze of dying lions.

the most trenchant commentary was

Much like to the mole in Æsopes fable, that, being blynd her selfe, would in no wise be perswaded that any beast could see.

It is the mynd, that maketh good or ill, That maketh wretch or happie, rich or poore: For some, that hath abundance at his will, Hath not enough, but wants in greatest store

I could certainly subscribe to the notion that life ends in old age, sickness, and death—but later, later.

When history gives out, fiction takes over.

That's one of the problems—and joys—of old age: every time you read a book it's the first.

So," he said. "What's the difference between me and a whore?" He swallowed. "Am I a whore?" "No more than every married woman.

Older guys have too much emotional baggage. They've already lived their lives.

That's the trouble with all you liberals: you think that people ought to be kept alive just because they happen to exist.

No two people ever read the same book.

Big doesn't necessarily mean better. Sunflowers aren't better than violets.

I tend not to look at the prison wall of life, but to look up at the sky, as it is more beautiful and more spacious. Try

If you spend a hundred bucks, or more, to go to the theatre, something should happen to you. Maybe somebody should be asking you some questions about your values, or about the way you think about things. Maybe you should come out of the theatre, something having happened to you. Maybe you should be changing, or thinking about changing. But if you just go there, and the only thing you worry about is where you left the damn car, then you wasted a hundred bucks.

Knowing it--knowing it's true is one thing, but believing what you know... well, there's the tough part.

what I wanted to get at is the value difference between pornographic playing cards when you're a kid, and pornographic playing cards when you're older. It's that when you're a kid you use the cards as a substitute for a real experience, and when you're older you use real experience as a substitute for the fantasy.