Quotes About Perspective

because we are all a great deal luckier than we realize, we usually get what we want—or near enough.

Just because we happen not to have actually seen something with our own two little winkles, we think it is not existing.

The peace we are offered is not a peace that is free from tragedy, illness, bankruptcy, divorce, depression, or heartache. It is peace rooted in the trust that the life Jesus gives us is deeper, wider, stronger, and more enduring than whatever our current circumstances are, because all we see is not all there is and the last word about us and our struggle has not yet been spoken.

Often the people most concerned about others going to hell when they die seem less concerned with the hells on earth right now, while the people most concerned with the hells on earth right now seem the least concerned about hell after death.

Jesus doesn't divide the world up into the common and the sacred; he gives us eyes to see the sacred in the common.

This is because conviction and humility, like faith and doubt, are not opposites; they're dance partners. It's possible to hold your faith with open hands, living with great conviction and yet at the same time humbly admitting that your knowledge and perspective will always be limited.

Decide now that you will not spend your precious energy speculating about someone else's life and how it compares with yours.

Because sometimes you need a biologist, and sometimes you need a poet. Sometimes you need a scientist, and sometimes you need a song.

Often times when I meet atheists and we talked about the god they don't believe in, we quickly discover that I don't believe in that god either.

When you're fighting, it's absolutely crucial to keep remembering that they're trying to figure it out just like you are.

In those moments when the two of you see things differently, you can hold on to your view, defending it and protecting it and arguing for its superiority, or you can allow your perspective to be broadened, enriched, expanded, and deepened.

To fully appreciate the Bible, you have to let it be what it is.

Like a mirror, God appears to be more and more a reflection of whoever it is that happens to be talking about God at the moment.

We rob ourselves of immeasurable joy when we compare what we do know about ourselves with what we don't know about someone else.

When in doubt, assume that they're seeing something that you aren't.

But sometimes when I hear people quote the Bible, I just want to throw up.

seeing where

Success is when you're seduced into thinking that your joy and satisfaction are not here but there--somewhere in the future, at some moment when you accomplish X or you win Y. Success can never get enough. It makes your head spin, because you get that thing you were desperately working for, for all those years, and when you get it, you realize that it isn't what you thought it was.

Often times when I meet atheists and we talk about the god they don't believe in, we quickly discover that I don't believe in that god either. So when we hear that a certain person has "rejected Christ," we should first ask, "Which Christ?

Some things that religious people make a big deal of are rather pointless. Avoid the insanity.

The Bible is a library of books reflecting how human beings have understood the divine.

Whoever you are and whatever work you do, no one has ever lived your life with your particular challenges and possibilities.

When we take ourselves too seriously it gets in the way of the thing that we are so seriously trying to do.

Suffering and loss have this extraordinary capacity to alert and awaken us to the gift that life is.