Quotes About Perspective

It's possible to have emptied your savings account and be living in your friend's basement riding your bike everywhere because you can't afford a car and yet feel like you're bursting with vitality. It's also possible to have lots of money in the bank, living in the house you had custom built, going on expensive vacations to exotic places, and yet you're miserable.

It's like there's a scale from 1 to 10, and you always would have sworn that someone or something mattered to you with a 10. But then you almost (or you actually do) lose her or him or it or them, and suddenly your heart is filled with a 17 or a 39 or a 4,291 kind of mattering. New capacities, ones you didn't know were possible before, open up inside of you.

So if that's it, if that's the point of it all, if that's the ticket, the center, the one unavoidable reality, the heart of the Christian faith, why is it that no one used the phrase until the last hundred years or so?

when people object to the idea of God, to the idea that there is more beyond our tangible, provable-with-hard-evidence observations and experiences of the world, they aren't taking the entire world into account.

But maybe all of these questions are missing the point. Let's set aside all of the saying and doing and being and cutting holes in roofs and assume it's more simple than that. As some would say, "Just believe.

Sometimes we don't throw ourselves into it because we believe the small things are beneath us. What we don't understand is that what appear to be the small things are actually the big things. They're where it starts, and throwing yourself into them inevitably creates new opportunities for you.

may have been done or said by someone else. That's a distinct possibility. It may have been done or said before. But it hasn't been done or said by you. It hasn't come through your unique flesh and blood, through your life, through your experience and insight and perspective.

By the way, when the writer John in the book of Revelation gets a current glimpse of the heavens, one detail he mentions about crowns is that people are taking them off [chap. 4]. Apparently, in the unvarnished presence of the divine a lot of things that we consider significant turn out to be, much like wearing a crown, quite absurd.)

Why would anybody become a Christian?" That's a question lots of people have—educated, reasonable, modern people who find becoming a Christian an "explosive," not to mention an inconceivable, thing to do.

Success says, What more can I get? Craft says, Can you believe I get to do this?

The only real voyage consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes; in seeing the universe through the eyes of another, one hundred others-in seeing the hundred universes that each of them sees. Marcel Proust, translated by Kiyotesong

Everyone who believes in the devil is the devil.

What's it like? Death? It's like being on holiday with a group of Germans.

A great artist can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is ... and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be ... more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo see that this lovely young girl is still alive

Senators came to realize that he understood not only their bills but the reasons they had introduced them;

Said Hoover: "Nobody is actually starving. The hoboes, for example, are better fed than they have ever been. One hobo in New York got ten meals in one day.

Johnson was insulated from reality by his hopes and dreams.

determining the essence of different points of view (what Lyndon Johnson called "listening")

He repeated his plea that they be fair and open-minded, open to reason and compromise, and praised them for being so reasonable and open-minded thus far—which of course made it harder for them to act otherwise

One man's theology is another man's belly laugh.

Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes. Keep this in mind; it may offer a way to make him your friend. If not, you can kill him without hate — and quickly.

No woman ever ages beyond eighteen in her heart.

Most neuroses and some psychoses can be traced to the unnecessary and unhealthy habit of daily wallowing in the troubles and sins of five billion strangers.

Does history record any case in which the majority was right?