Quotes About Perspective

I never learned from a man who agreed with me

It is almost impossible to shake of one's earliest training. Duke, can you get it through your skull that had you been brought up by Martians, you would have the same attitude toward eating and being eaten as Mike has.

Talking with a Martian is something like talking with an echo. You don't get any argument but you don't get results either.

most things are right or wrong only in their backgrounds; few things are good or evil in themselves.

The capacity of humans to believe in what seems to me highly improbable—from table tapping to the superiority of their children—has never been plumbed.

I've found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts so much . . . because it's the only thing that'll make it stop hurting." Jill

One might almost define intelligence as the level at which an aware organism demands, 'What's in it for me?

Having been born to wealth, stealing doesn't fret me as much as it does him.

What statute was violated, if any, in turning a man exactly ninety degrees from everything else?

Sir, talking with a Martian is like talking with an echo. You don't get argument but you don't get results.

I say 'art' advisedly, for art is undefined, undefinable, and without limits. I can use the word without fear of misusing it, for it has no exact meaning. There are as many meanings as there are artists.

What distinguishes Buddhism from any other faith I've studied—from most human beings, really—is that the people who face the wall and the people who face away from it have never fought a war over it. They're never going to agree…but they feel no need to. Buddha himself is supposed to have said, "People with opinions just go around bothering each other.

property' is not the natural and obvious concept that most people think it is.

The capacity of humans to believe in what seems to me highly improbable

anyone who "won" a family argument had in fact lost it.

But how, from the viewpoint of a Martian, did man differ from other animals? Would a race that could levitate and god knows what else be impressed by engineering? If so would the Aswan Dam or a thousand miles of coral reef win first prize? Man's self awareness, sheer conceit. There was no way to prove that sperm whales and sequoias were not philosophers and poets exceeding any human merit?

Who can possibly be as deeply inside a story as the person who writes it?

Could it be that every one of all religions is true?

Being aware that he had but a short time to live and having neither Martian nor Kansan faith in immortality, he purposed to live each golden moment as eternity—without fear, without hope, with sybaritic gusto.

To be "matter of fact" about the world is to blunder into fantasy--and dull fantasy at that, as the real world is strange and wonderful.

Zeb should command while Jacob handled space-time controls—to each his own. Jacob had asked me to please take orders from Zeb with no back talk … which had miffed me a little.

As his eye ( sic ) approached the distant, rounded horizon the details softened, giving a strong effect, of stereo, of depth, of three-dimensional globularness—the world indeed was round!

I started to try to talk sense but was cut off by a giant voice from everywhere: "YOU ARE NOW BEING JUDGED!

Sovereign," like "love," means anything you want it to mean; it's a word in dictionary between "sober" and "sozzled.