Quotes About Perspective

Why had he wanted to be rich, or to feel rich? Was he an unhappy mouse before? Didn't he see the King himself often looking sad? Was anyone completely happy?

The man who counts his blessings will not have time to count his enemies.

Craig Karpel to his fellow Boomers. In The Retirement Myth,

Around World War II, we were proud as a people but modest as individuals. Fewer than two people in ten said yes when asked, Are you a very important person? Today, more than six in ten say yes. Where we once thought ourselves collectively strong, we now regard ourselves as individually entitled.

Around World War II, we were proud as a people but modest as individuals. Fewer than two people in ten said yes when asked, Are you a very important person? Today, more than six in ten say yes.

some historians now say there is no single history at all—just a multitude of histories, one for each region, language, family, industry, class, and race.

The farther backward you look, the farther forward you are likely to see," Winston Churchill once said.

It points, for instance, to the fact that there is never an abstract, single 'Christian answer' to an issue to which all Christians are bound to adhere or conform.

No Ocidente estamos todos mal habituados. É uma das coisas boas que tem vir para a Índia, temos de enfrentar tantas coisas horríveis que desenvolvemos uma certa imunidade em relação a elas.

There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell. You can bear this warning voice to generations yet to come. I look upon war with horror.

It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.

Humility does not mean thinking less of yourself than of other people, nor does it mean having a low opinion of your own gifts. It means freedom from thinking about yourself one way or the other at all. . . . The humility which consists in being a great deal occupied about yourself, and saying you are of little worth, is not Christian humility. It is one form of self-occupation and a very poor and futile one at that.

Blake, I know you don't live on Butt St, Uranus.

Can you, at a minimum, objectively step back—throw out the stereotypes, ditch the conformity, set aside the religion—and ask yourself, why? Why Jesus?

The same applies to any artist; we are the tools and instruments of our talent. We are outsiders; we have no place in society because society is what we're watching, and dealing with.

By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You're sort of a predator, an invader of people.

Memories can be everything if we choose to make them so. But you are right: you mustn't do that. That is for me, and I shall do it.

My fiction may, now and again, illuminate aspects of the human condition, but I do not consciously set out to do so: I am a storyteller.

I have never believed in the axiom that a writer should first and foremost write about what he knows. I think it's a piece of misinformation.

Read not for the facts but for the angles of thinking.

If there is a single lesson I have learned, it is this: in life, we are destined to lose many things. That is the nature of life. Never mind. Just don't lose the present. Nothing is worth it.

How can we get what we really want and at the same time deal with the needs of others in our lives? Perhaps no human dilemma is more pervasive or challenging.

George Bernard Shaw once observed: "People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them.

To accept our past, it helps to reframe our stories and give a positive meaning to even the most difficult life events. We may have no power to change the past, but we do have the power to change the meaning we assign to it.