Quotes About Perspective

Truthfulness is overrated. The world works the way we want it to because of a thousand little innocent lies.

Well-defined theological convictions did not admit contrary viewpoints, for even the consideration of alternate possibilities ran contrary to the notion of faith.

Some preachers use the Bible the way a drunk uses a lamp post . . . more for support than for illumination.

Blind adherence to contextualization alters our preaching in at least three ways, and none of them is for the better. First, it impairs our perspective in the study—in his preparation of his sermon, the preacher becomes preoccupied with the world rather than God's Word. This leads to impressionistic preaching.

don't ever let your focus be so much on the one cloud in the sky that you miss noticing the unending expanse of beautiful blue and the brilliant, shining sun all around. What I do

number of years a person lives has nothing to do with whether or not they've lived a full life. Eighty years is a lot of years, I guess, when compared to twenty years. But just because a person has lived a lot of years doesn't mean they've lived a full life.

There are many things in this world that are an outrage, to be sure, but death at our current life expectancy doesn't strike me as one of them. Maybe I sound like some Victorian who felt that forty years ought to be enough for any man, but one of the marks of a life well lived has to be reaching a state of finally getting it, of not needing more, and of being able to sign off with something approaching peace of mind.

Almost any age is better than twenty-two.

We refuse to let our knowledge, however limited, be informed by your ignorance, however vast.

Most of the major events of human history gradually lose their meaning: wars that seemed at the time all

WHEN you are creeping through the literary underbrush hoping to bag a piece of humor with your net, nothing seems funny," Russell Baker wrote in a preface to an anthology of American humor that he compiled. "The thing works the other way around. Humor is funny when it sneaks up on you and takes you by surprise." Yes

The dead forever change the living.

Our identity is like a kaleidoscope. With each turn we reset it not to a former or final state but to a new one that reflects the here-and-now positions of the pieces we have to work with. The design is always new because the shifts are continual. That is what makes kaleidoscopes, and us, so appealing and beautiful.

When I see I am nothing, that is wisdom. When I see I am everything, that is love. My life is a movement between these two. —NISARGADATTA MAHARAJ

The tragic youth was going down on me (...) I've been right and I've been wrong Now I'm back where I started from Never looked over reality's shoulder

We all often think about what's easy to think about, rather than what's right to think about.

There's a famous finding in the psychological literature," Ochsner explains, "showing that six months later, someone who has become a paraplegic is just as happy as someone who's won the lottery. It seems clear people are doing something to find what's positive in even the most dire of circumstances. The one thing you can always do is control your interpretation of the meaning of the situation

The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions. ANTHONY JAY

we see the world as we are, not as the world is.

As Stone says, "This always on, anywhere, anytime, anyplace era has created an artificial sense of constant crisis. What happens to mammals in a state of constant crisis is the adrenalized fight-or-flight mechanism kicks in. It's great when tigers are chasing us. How many of those five hundred emails a day is a tiger?" Despite

One of the difficulties of stretching ourselves is that we tend to see ourselves as our limitations, not as our potential. We're lost in our own world.

Trying to change other people's thinking appears to be one of the hardest tasks in the world. While the easy answer may seem to be to give people feedback, real change happens when people see things they have not seen before. The best way to help someone see something new is to help quiet her mind so that she can have a moment of insight. As you have insights, you change your brain, and by changing your brain you change your whole world.

As children we recognized that we belonged to an unusual, even exceptional, family, but the effect was different on each of us.

He rolls his eyes when I mention the dog connection. "What is it with you and dogs?" "Dogs are like humans, only better in every respect," I say.