Quotes About Perspective

Chinese are noted for their aphorisms and proverbs, and they and Indians find great sources of humor in parables, which we in the West find only moderately funny, although they do combine wisdom, moralizing and a sense of perspective

As is often true of biblical literature, it is up to the reader to hear and appraise the contradictory messages and then create from them a pattern of meaning that relates to the reader's particular situation.

the market has been anthropomorphized. It is not created by us but creates us. That's what the market distates. If Jesus can talk to you, the market can talk to you.

Our old ideas are not so much overthrown as upset. The old is not destroyed; it is replaced. We simply learn to see new things in a different light.

Keynes had the happiest of marriages, and the best of wives for him, but marital contentment narrowed his outlook and temper.77

party passions led to muddled or dishonest thinking, made people unreasonable or stereotypical, and lacked long-term perspective.

Vertebrate brains and objective reality do not fit together like the pieces of a puzzle, for the simple reason that we ourselves create every idea from our own 'objective reality.' 'Real reality,' outside our perception, inevitably remains a construct, and each of us has to decide where God figures in it.

We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one.

when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.

Life... It tends to respond to our outlook, to shape itself to meet our expectations.

Sentences that begin with 'You' are probably not true. For instance, when I write: "You are a pet human named Morlock being disciplined by your master, a Beowulf cluster of FreeBSD 22.0 servers in the year 2052. Last week you tried to escape by digging a hole under the perimeter, which means this week you may be put to sleep for being a renegade human." That's not true, at least not yet.

Happiness has a bad rap. People say it shouldn't be your goal in life. Oh, yes it should.

Half the confusion in the world comes from not knowing how little we need.

objectivity arose from subjectivity—the recognition that two minds could have different representations of the world and that the world has an existence independent of either representation. This

Zen Buddhist dictum that "the opposite of a great truth is also true.

Serious disputes are seldom resolved without a genuine change in the parties' thinking. And a false consensus may be more productive of conflict than an honest disagreement.

Every biblical story reflects something that mattered to its author. Whenever we figure out what it was and why it mattered, we move a step closer to knowing who wrote a part of the Bible.

One man's piety is often another man's poison.

Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me

There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.

Someone ... tell us what's important, because we no longer know.

Whether we find it appealing or not is another question, but personally I like being fourth cousin to a mushroom and having a bonobo as my closest living relative. It makes me feel a part of the world.

There is no final truth in palaeontology. Every new observer brings something of his or her own: a new technique, a new intelligence, even new mistakes. The past mutates. The scientist is on a perpetual journey into a past that can never be fully known, and there is no end to the quest for knowledge.