Quotes About Perspective

Ha! I like the world, kid. I like its sense of humour. I like the way it gets its own back on the know-it-alls and the stuck-ups and the well-meaners.

Was there? Was it true? Or was it just grown-ups making you scared with their own fears?

I just like movies that somehow expose the world in a way that's different than you imagine it.

To project our own worldview is to refuse to learn what happened, which prevents us comprehending worldviews that differ significantly from our own. If we insist on treating history as a mirror, we shall see only ourselves.

Excessive information creates its own form of blindness to what is actually going on.

Lovers of air travel find it exhilarating to hang poised between the illusion of immortality and the fact of death.

Sorrow seemed to me to be more like a road wound through life

There are two kinds of people, I think: those who want to know the future and those who do not. I've never met anyone ambivalent about this. I have been both kinds. For now, I think I know which one is better, but I'm prepared to change my mind again. It may be I am like that drunk who tells himself he can handle his alcohol now. But if I told you I could tell the future, you would laugh at me. And I would laugh at me too.

It's much like writing an essay or including autobiographical content in fiction—to succeed, it requires an ability to be coldly impersonal about yourself and your state, so as not to cloud what is there with what you want to see.

Their whole difficult lives seemed not to weigh on them at all. Taken as mornings and meals, suppers and evenings, all of the world could be carried, both the sad and the delicious, their lives seemed to say.

I was unsure how they fed themselves, what they would eat and drink, they were not unsure at all and this terrified me. I

Learn to think continentally.

I cannot make everybody else as rapid as myself.

You can awaken people by dreaming their dreams more clearly than they dream themselves.

One must open men's eyes, not tear them out.

I am more and more convinced that our happiness or unhappiness depends more on the way we meet the events of life than on the nature of those events themselves.

One day, someone showed me a glass of water that was half full. And he said, "Is it half full or half empty?" So I drank the water. No more problem.

Diaries are terrible liars. They record dramas out of context, encourage paranoia, rearrange facts, are deliberately biased and self-justifying, blind you with irrelevance, censor alternative opinion, exaggerate petty complaints into tragic emblems and, in particular, wallow in the fact that any fool can write about dejection, but describing happiness takes determination and skill. Most diaries are moans in writing, even when the person writing them is happy.

Skeptics become overwhelmed by the different and conflicting accounts of what happiness, justice, truth are all about.

But you cannot expect every writer to dwell on human suffering. I think my books do deal with grave issues. People who say they are too positive probably haven't read them.

It's through the small things that we develop our moral imagination, so that we can understand the sufferings of others.

If your ceiling should fall down, then you have lost a room, but gained a courtyard. Think of it that way.

There are many women whose lives would be immeasurably improved by widowhood, but one should not always point that out.

The problem, of course, was that people did not seem to understand the difference between right and wrong. They needed to be reminded about this, because if you left it to them to work out for themselves, they would never bother. They would just find out what was best for them, and then they would call that the right thing. That's how most people thought.