Quotes About Perspective

The past always comes clearer, in the future.

Kids in my class think a black walnut looks just like a white ash. Are they blind?" "Plant-blind. Adam's curse. We only see things that look like us. Sad story, ain't it, kiddo?

once you enumerate them all, once you sample seven billion examples from each of seven billion humans and fit them together in their trillion trillion contexts, all things begin to come clear.

Trees are their kin, with hopes, fears, and social codes, and their goal as people has always been to charm and inveigle green things, to win them in symbolic marriage.

He was an amateur naturalist, fond of birds and animals but not of humanity in general.

The few explosions did not seem a miracle of deliverance to the civilians of the enemy cities upon whom the bombs would be dropped.

In an attempt to break out and be a reasonable man, I had to realize that my own worries about what I did were valid and were important, but that they were not the whole story, that there must be a complementary way of looking at them, because other people did not see them as I did.

In scientific work, creative thinking demands seeing things not seen previously, or in ways not previously imagined; and this necessitates jumping off from "normal" positions, and taking risks by departing from reality.

But if anybody says he can think about quantum problems without getting giddy, that only shows that he has not understood the first thing about them. - Niels Bohr

had to realize that my own worries about what I did were valid and were important, but that they were not the whole story, that there must be a complementary way of looking at them, because other people did not see them as I did.2146 And I needed what they saw, and needed them." Certainly he found the more traditional alleviation of losing himself in work.

does not even try to give us complete information about the events around us—it gives information about the correlations between

Thomas Merton, the American monk, pointed out that we may spend our whole life climbing the ladder of success, only to find when we get to the top that our ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.

If we don't learn to mythologize our lives, inevitably we will pathologize them.

Most people confuse their life situation with their actual life, which is an underlying flow beneath the everyday events.

Your concern is not so much to have what you love anymore, but to love what you have—right now. This is a monumental change from the first half of life, so much so that it is almost the litmus test of whether you are in the second half of life at all.

In my experience, if you are not radically grateful every day, resentment always takes over.

We do not think ourselves into a new way of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking.

A lot of us pray as if prayer is really twisting the arm of God or convincing God to do something. We think by saying more words we'll talk God into it. We think, "If I say it one more time, God will agree with me." That very attitude is an alienating attitude. It keeps us in the role of doing it "right" or often enough to convince an unready or unwilling God. Wrong, wrong, wrong! 19 minutes ago

Your concern is not so much to have what you love anymore, but to love what you have—right now.

You do not think yourself into a new way of living as much as you live your way into a new way of thinking.

To quote Archimedes once again, you must have both "a lever and a place to stand" before you can move the world. The educated and sophisticated Western person today has many levers, but almost no solid place on which to stand, with either very weak identities or terribly overstated identities.

Francis's starting place was human suffering instead of human sinfulness

Carl Jung, in his Collected Works (8, 784): "We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be of little importance in the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.

most people do not see things as they are, they see things as they are!