Quotes About Perspective

I read the first chapter of A Brief History of Time when Dad was still alive, and I got incredibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how, compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn't even matter if I existed at all. When Dad was tucking me in that night and we were talking about the book, I asked if he could think of a solution to that problem. Which problem? The problem of how relatively insignificant we are.

I've lived long enough to know I'm not one-hundred-percent anything!

The letter was destroyed, but its final paragraph is still inside of me. She wrote, I wish I could be a girl again, with the chance to live my life again. I have suffered so much more than I needed to. And the joys I have felt have not always been joyous. I could have lived differently.

He thought cucumbers were good enough, but pickles were delicious—so absolutely delicious, in fact, that he questioned whether they were, indeed, made from cucumbers, which were only good enough.

I'd experienced joy, but not nearly enough, could there be enough? The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering.

I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.

You do not have to present not-truths to me, Sasha. I am not a child. (But I do. That is what you always fail to understand. I present not-truths to protect you. I exist in case you need to be protected.) I do not understand, I said. (I understand.) You do not? he said. (You do.) ... I am not a bad person, he said. I am a good person who has lived in a bad time. I know this, I said. (Even if you were a bad person, I would still know you are a good person.)

Ela escreveu: quem me dera ser outra vez rapariga e ter a possibilidade de viver de novo a minha vida. Sofri muito mais que o necessário. E as alegrias que tive nem sempre foram alegres. Podia ter vivido de uma maneira diferente.

We are not only the tellers of our stories, we are the stories themselves.

The French, who love their dogs, sometimes eat their horses. The Spanish, who love their horses, sometimes eat their cows. The Indians, who love their cows, sometimes eat their dogs.

I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn't the world, it wasn't the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don't know, but it's so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me?

Can the familiarity of the animals we have come to know as companions be a guide to us as we think about the animals we eat? Just how distant are fish (or cows, pigs, or chickens) from us in the scheme of life? Is it a chasm or a tree that defines the distance? Are nearness and distance even relevant? If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it regarded us as we regard fish, what would be our argument against being eaten?

It was not until very much in the posterior that I understanded that each of us was laughing for a different reason, for our own reason, and that not on of those reasons had a thing to do with the potato.

I have often felt that my vegetarianism matters more to such people than it does to me.

We could retell our stories and make them better, more representational or aspirational. Or we could choose to tell different stories. The world itself had another chance.

Hoewel hij het bijna voortdurend betreurde dat hij zichzelf was, verwarde hij zichzelf nooit met het probleem. De wereld was het probleem. Die paste niet. Maar hoe vaak zou er ooit iemand gelukkiger zijn geworden door het laakbaarheidsrecord van de wereld te verbeteren?

Different people will draw the line in different places with regard to farms like Paul's and Frank's. People I respect draw it differently. But for me, for now —for my family now —my concerns about the reality of what meat is and has become are enough to make me give it up altogether.

Good writers are pleasing, very good writers make you feel and think, great writers make you change.

But not even to save your life?" "If nothing matters, there's nothing to save.

This is what my grandmother meant when she said, "If nothing matters, there's nothing to save.

That really changed me, when I realized that an excruciating life is worse than an excruciating death.

I know that it is not necessary that there be one right thing. There may be two right things. There may be no right things.

Punning is a talent which no man affects to despise but he that is without it.

I'm as old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth.