Quotes About Perspective

Among all the impossible things he had already witnessed, what were a few more?

Sometimes you get a sense of when the truth of things will not be revealed by microscopes.

In college, what had always stuck with him in Astronomy 101 was that the first astronomers to think of points of light not as part of a celestial tapestry revolving around the earth but as individual planets had had to wrench their imaginations--and thus their analogies and metaphors--out of a grooved track that had been running through everyone's minds for hundreds and hundreds of years.

Looking for hidden meaning in these papers was the same as looking for hidden meaning in the natural world around us. If it existed, it could be activated only by the eye of the beholder.

The terrible thing, the thought I cannot dislodge after all I have seen, is that I can no longer say with conviction that this is a bad thing. Not when looking at the pristine nature of Area X and then the world beyond, which we have altered so much.

What if I said you still hold some of the answers, too.

the longer I looked the more certain I became that these figures were real and living, though perhaps not according to the standards that the camera and the biologist would insist upon.

there is something useful about the focal point of a story being an animal...I think it is very important right now, with regard to preservation of nature, to try to inhabit non-human perspectives and to, in some way, use fiction as the laboratory it should be. To explore things that are outside of the norms and not use it for the novel of manners or the thing that has been done before. (from Bloom Aftertalk interview)

Hellooo Pelican, come in, come in? No? Okay. You just be that way, you petulant bird.

Nothing that lived and breather was truly objective-even in a vaccum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth.

A bird can be a bat. A bat can be a piece of floating plastic bag. Way of the world. To see things as other things.

That is the tragedy of everyday life: when you are in it, you can never see your self clearly.

I was in love with everything- I wanted to look with love at the angry people so that their eyes would be forced to respond; and I wanted to bring gifts to the envious and tell them that I am worthless.

Think what you like. There are people who die by remaining alive and others who gain life by dying.

The truth of the scholar, alone in his study, does not always accord with what the world at large considers to be true.

We are different, my friend. We are visionaries. A monkey looks up and sees and banana, and that is as far as he looks. But a visionary looks up and sees the moon.

When people used to complain to the Buddha that they were upset, telling him, Our children upset us; our partner agitates us, his simple reply would be, You are not upset because of your children or your partner; you are upset because you are upsettable.

The trouble with specialists is that they tend to think in grooves. From time to time something happens to shake them out of that groove.

The point is best made by Aristotle, who supposedly asked, "Would you rather be a happy pig or an unhappy human?" HSPs prefer the good feeling of being very conscious, very human, even if what we are conscious of is not always cause for rejoicing.

to have great pain is to have certainty; to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt.

When one goes on to find better, or higher, or truer, or more enduring, or more widely agreed upon forms of beauty, what happens to our regard for the less good, less high, less true, less universal instances? Simone Weil says, He who has gone farther, to the very beauty of the world itself, does not love them any less but much more deeply than before.

You see, when you're hunting for the glad things, you sort of forget the other kind—like

He said he felt better right away, that first day he thought to count 'em. He said if God took the trouble to tell us eight hundred times to be glad and rejoice, He must want us to do it—SOME. And father felt ashamed that he hadn't done it more. After that, they got to be such a comfort to him, you know, when things went wrong;

that's one of the times I just did it without thinking, I reckon. You see, you DO, lots of times; you get so used to it—looking for something to be glad about, you know. And most generally there is something about everything that you can be glad about, if you keep hunting long enough to find it.