Quotes About Perspective

I don't understand," she admitted at last. "You were trying to kill each other fifteen years ago, and you're friends now. Don't you even argue about the North and the South and who was right?" "Johnny Reb" laughed. "What's it to a soldier the right and the wrong of it all? He's there for the fighting, that's what he likes. Doesn't matter who you're fighting, long as he gives you a good fight.

It's not about what you've done; it's how you've experienced whatever has happened to you. Matt Lawrence in The Overachievers

Someone else's success is not your failure.

Too many parents fail to understand that there is a difference between fitting in and being liked, that there is a difference between being "normal" and being happy. High school is temporary. Family is not.

Love of truth shows itself in this, that a man knows how to find and value the good in everything. GOETHE

Still, I believed I understood. Or maybe I just put it in a context I could safely manage.

He had never been able to find any technique to handle that quality in her. Sometimes she acquiesced immediately to his requests, but on other occasions she refused them flatly and he could not reverse her. It never occurred to Lane that his wife sometimes concluded he was right and sometimes wrong. To Lane, it was approach not content that moved the world. He

I am not proud, but I am happy; and happiness blinds, I think, more than pride.

It's necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live.

There are two ways of seeing: with the body and with the soul. The body's sight can sometimes forget, but the soul remembers forever.

Those born to wealth, and who have the means of gratifying every wish, know not what is the real happiness of life, just as those who have been tossed on the stormy waters of the ocean on a few frail planks can alone realize the blessings of fair weather.

Often we pass beside happiness without seeing it, without looking at it, or even if we have seen and looked at it, without recognizing it.

There is a lesson that I learned at twelve - the world does not end at the edge of a quad. There are people outside. The world does not end on the Fourth Level. There are people elsewhere. It took me two years to learn to apply the lesson - that neither does the world end with the Ship. If you want to accept life, you have to accept the whole bloody universe. The universe is filled with people, and there is not a single solitary spear carrier among them.

I tell myself and the officers I train the LANFWM principle, which is, Life Ain't No Fucking Western Movie.

The Dimensional box concept is used to entrap us, never believe that these are real or will ever be in reality.

The Dimensional box concept is used to entrap us, never believe they are real.

The quality of life is more important than life itself.

People tell stories all the time: the stories they want told, where any story could be changed or warped this way or that.

S. Neill put it, promising a reward for an activity is "tantamount to declaring that the activity is not worth doing for its own sake."26 Thus, a parent who says to a child, "If you finish your math homework, you may watch an hour of TV" is teaching the child to think of math as something that isn't much fun.

the question is not whether more flies can be caught with honey than with vinegar, but why the flies are being caught in either case—and how this feels to the fly.

Sometimes the alternative to black and white isn't gray; it's, say, orange.

the most notable aspect of a positive judgment is not that it is positive but that it is a judgment.

what actually stood between the carrot and the stick was, of course, a jackass.

The failure to adopt other people's points of view, to take an imaginative leap out of oneself, is one way to account for much of the behavior we find, troublesome, from littering to murder. (Kafka once referred to war as "a monstrous failure of imagination.") Perspective taking helps us at once to see others as fundamentally similar to ourselves despite superficial differences (in that we share a common humanity)