Quotes About Perspective

I have no regrets. I had an amazing surrogate who carried my son for me. I am so grateful to her. I can even say I am grateful for having cancer. I was always meant to be a mom, but if I didn't have cancer, I never would have had Zev. I would have had a kid, but not Zev, and I want Zev - tantrums and all.

Life is what we see

I would rather have to extract information from the devil himself than from a child.

When you write a poem these relations must reverse themselves. That is, the relation of the words to the subject must weaken and the relation of the words to the writer (you) must take on strength.

I hate that phrase "the real world." Why is an aircraft factory more real than a university? Is it?

Think small.... If you can't think small, try philosophy or social criticism.

Language is powerful. What we say can shape how we think—and it certainly shapes how others think about us. In this regard, calling the business a "customer" simply conveys the idea that IT is not part of the business.

Meditation sends us into our ordinary world with greater perspective and balance.

Brandom's critics, and more generally those critics of pragmatism who hold fast to their strong "realistic intuitions," want something much more substantial and nonperspectival. They want acknowledgment of a hard-core reality that is not "contaminated" by human subjectivity or perspective.

Rorty is just as dismissive of James's many references to 'experience' – a word that appears in almost every text that James ever wrote. In short, Rorty's pragmatism is a pragmatism without experience. And frankly, I agree with those who have strongly argued that to eliminate experience from pragmatism (old or new) is to eviscerate pragmatism, to leave us with a gutless shadow of pragmatism.

From the perspective of the logical empiricists, the pragmatic thinkers were viewed as having seen through a glass darkly what was now seen much more clearly. The myth developed (and unfortunately became entrenched) that pragmatism was primarily an anticipation of logical positivism, in particular, the positivist's verifiability criterion of meaning.

God's ownership of everything also changes the kind of question we ask in giving. Rather than, "How much of my money should I give to God?" we learn to ask, "How much of God's money should I keep for myself?" The difference between these two questions is of monumental proportions.

We pass from thinking of God as part of our life to the realization that we are part of his life.

Important insights ought never to be limited to the group from which may arise.

We would do well to come to the Bible with these words ringing in our ears: 'You have heard it said . . . but I say to you . . .

If we think we will have joy only by praying and singing psalms, we will be disillusioned. But if we fill our lives with simple good things and constantly thank God for them, we will be joyful, that is, full of joy. And what about our problems? When we determine to dwell on the good and excellent things in life, we will be so full of those things that they will tend to swallow our problems.

Geometric diagrams are to geometers what board and pieces are to chessmasters: visual aids, helpful but not indispensable.

I use logic all the time in mathematics, and it seems to yield "correct" results, but in mathematics "correct" by and large means "logical", so I'm back where I started. I can't defend logic because I can't remove my glasses.

On principle, we should be suspicious of explanations for other people's beliefs and behaviors when those explanations imply they would believe and behave as we do, if only the were as mature and enlightened as we are

The way I see it, anyone who's proud of their country is either a thug or just hasn't read enough history yet.

You live that long, things start happening to you. You get too impressed with yourself. Ends up, you think you're God. Suddenly the little people, thirty, maybe forty years old, well, they don't really matter anymore. You've seen whole societies rise and fall, and you start to feel you're standing outside it all, and none of it really matters to you. And maybe you'll start snuffing those little people, just like picking daisies, if they get under your feet.

When a man you know to be of sound mind tells you his recently deceased mother has just tried to climb in his bedroom window and eat him, you only have two basic options. You can smell his breath, take his pulse and check his pupils to see if he's ingested anything nasty, or you can believe him.

I'm not a huge fan of other people's logic.

Brooding is for chickens, as my first-grade teacher used to say. Or maybe it was Lucifer. Homily reciters all kind of run together for me.