Quotes About Perspective

They're not cruel; they're just pig-headed and provincial. The fact that you have feelings never occurs to them.

Dad would haul down a book and we'd look it up. Then he would try four or five more with other opinions. Dad doesn't hold with the idea that it-must-be-true-or-they-wouldn't-have-printed-it; he doesn't consider any opinion sacred—it shocked me the first time he took out a pen and changed something in one of my math books.

He was staring over the bulge of the Earth at a curved horizon; he vas seeing the Earth as round.

Whores perform the same function as priests, Ira, but far more thoroughly.

He was staring over the bulge of the Earth at a curved horizon; he was seeing the Earth as round.

All psychological suffering (or happiness, taken in its usual sense) is a matter of comparison.

Perhaps one of the greatest jokes of my life is that I first went to India to be spiritualized, and I came home humanized.

If i can stay with my conflicting impulses long enough, the two opposing forces will teach each other something and produce an insight that serves them both. This is not a compromise but a depth of understanding that puts my life in perspective and allows me to know with certainty what I should do. That certainty is one of the most precious qualities known to human kind.

Marriage is a very different experience for a man than for a woman. The man is adding to his stature; his world is getting stronger, and he has risen in stature and position. He generally does not understand that he is killing the Psyche in his new wife, and that he

must do this. If she behaves strangely, or if something goes dreadfully wrong, or there are many tears, he usually doesn't understand that marriage is a totally different experience for her than for him.

The Copenhagen Interpretation is sometimes called model agnosticism and holds that any grid we use to organize our experience of the world is a model of the world and should not be confused with the world itself. Alfred Korzybski , the semanticist, tried to popularize this outside physics with the slogan, The map is not the territory. Alan Watts , a talented exegete of Oriental philosophy, restated it more vividly as The menu is not the meal.

Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar situation here on this planet, it is because they have accepted a religious Faith or a secular Ideology (Ideologies are the modern form of Faiths) and just stopped thinking.

All that we know is what registers on our brains, so what you perceive (your individual reality-tunnel) is made up of nothing but thoughts—as Sir Humphrey Davy noted when self-experimenting with nitrous oxide in 1819, and as Buddha noticed by sitting alone until all his social imprints atrophied and dropped away.

Existence is larger than any model that is not itself the exact size of existence....

Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only own one encyclopedia.

Humans live through their myths and only endure their realities.

Relativity and quantum mechanics have demonstrated clearly that what you find out with instruments is true relative only to the instrument you're using, and where that instrument is located in space-time. So there is no vantage point from which 'real' reality can be seen; we're all looking from the point of view of our own reality tunnels.

I can summarize my thoughts now by simply saying each must find his or her own Way because the way does not exist.

If one can only see things according to one's own belief system, one is destined to become virtually deaf, dumb, and blind.

There is no complete theory of anything.

he had an ego so large that only by contemplating the mathematical definition of infinity could anything so limitless be imagined.

Thus, we can name our two heads — we have a real head outside the perceived universe and a perceived head inside the perceived universe, and our real head now appears, not only much bigger than our perceived head, but bigger than our perceived universe.

Of course, it is fairly easy to see that other people's minds operate this way; it is comparatively much harder to become aware that one's own mind is working that way also.

The parallels with my own experience are numerous – but so are the differences. If the same source was beaming ideas to both Phil and me, the messages got our individual flavors mixed into them as we decoded the signals.