Quotes About Perspective

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all.

I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon the earth and be an atheist, but I cannot conceive how a man could look up into the heavens and say there is no God.

I don't like that man. I must get to know him better.

I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.

To the man who only has a hammer in the toolkit, every problem looks like a nail.

To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail.

Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives!

In America, my initial impression was that death or the possibility of it always seemed to come as a surprise, as if we took it for granted that we were immortal, and that death was just an option.

To see the miraculous in the ordinary is a more precious gift than prophecy.

He invited me to a world that wasn't secret, but it was well hidden. You needed a guide. You had to know what to look for, but also how to look. You had to exert yourself to see this world." p 224

You can't walk across a lake just because you change its name to "land." Labels matter.

I don't think you can be a physician and not see yourself reflected in your patient's illness. How would I deal with the kind of news I'd given Mr. Walters?

Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse under your wheel.

Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward.

Ammachi, when I come to the end of a book and I look up, just four days have passed. But in that time I've lived through three generations and learned more about the world and about myself than I do during a year in school.

Child, the past is past, and furthermore it's different every time I remember it.

Prison," I'd heard Ghosh laughingly tell Adid, "is the best thing for a marriage. If you can't send your spouse, then go yourself. It works wonders.

When you look around Addis and see children barefoot and shivering in the rain, when you see the lepers begging for their next morsel, does any of that Monophysitic nonsense matter the least bit?" Matron

As if my past life was revealed to be a waste, a gesture in slow motion, because what I considered scarce and precious was in fact plentiful and cheap, and what I counted as rapid progress turned out to be glacially slow. The

I don't think you can be a physician and not see yourself reflected in your patient's illness.

He invited me to a world that wasn't secret, but it was well hidden. You needed a guide. You had to know what to look for, but also how to look. You had to exert yourself to see this world. But if you did, if you had that kind of curiosity, if you had an innate interest in the welfare of your fellow human beings, and if you went through that door, a strange thing happened: you left your petty troubles on the threshold. It could be addictive.

Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward." from CUTTING FOR STONE

His motivation was to rattle the good people of Greenwich mean time, have them raise their heads from their tea and scones, and say, Oh, yes. Africa. For a fleeting moment they'd have the same awareness of us that we had of them.

The voyage of discovery is not about new lands, but having new eyes.