Quotes About Perspective

Very little of the high Sierra makes it into its images. If you see a pretty photo from the Sierras, you always have to remember, it was a zillion times more beautiful than that!

To the locals, he realized, the Orkneys were the center of the world.

history was like some vast thing that was always over the tight horizon, invisible except in its effects. It was what happened when you weren't looking — an unknowable infinity of events, which although out of control, controlled everything.

Max Planck once said that a new paradigm takes over not when it convinces its opponents, but when its opponents eventually die.

Art should be used to change things.

Statistically it was not greatly different than it had been for previous generations, but anecdotally it had become so prominent that every problem was noticed and remarked. The cognitive error called ease of representation thrust them into a space where every problem they witnessed convinced them they were in an unprecedented colapse. They were getting depressed.

Wherever you go, there we are. It wasn't true. But it made him feel better. That was what words could do.

Someone should enjoy it," Ann said. When she was angry or bitter her voice became flat and distant, almost as if she were being matter-of-fact. "It won't be here long.

We are all alone in our own life-world, flying through the universe at great speed. Humans are lucky not to face that. If they don't.

The King asked his wise men for some single thing that would make him happy when he was sad, but sad when he was happy. They consulted and came back with a ring engraved with the message 'This Too Will Pass.

People only invoke history to ballast their arguments in the present." "Maybe

The only part of an argument that really matters is what we think of the people arguing. X claims a, Y claims b. They make arguments to support their claims, with any number of points. But when their listeners remember the discussion, what matters is simply that X believes a and Y believes b. People then form their judgement on what they think of X and Y.

The virus is rewriting our imaginations. What felt impossible has become thinkable. We're getting a different sense of our place in history. We know we're entering a new world, a new era. We seem to be learning our way into a new structure of feeling.

How you think about what you're doing makes a huge difference

Ideology, n. An imaginary relationship to a real situation. In common usage, what the other person has, especially when systematically distorting the facts.

historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can't grasp the current situation

Only when things fall apart do you realize it can happen to you. You never think it can happen to you, until it does.

Henry Ford was afraid that the amount of dirt that was being removed to make room for the foundation of the Empire State Building was so great that it would have a disastrous effect on the rotation of the Earth. Not a genius.

The weakness of businessmen was their belief that money was the point of the game;

The only part of an argument that really matters is what we think of the people arguing. X claims a, Y claims b. They make arguments to support their claims, with any number of points. But when their listeners remember the discussion, what matters is simply that X believes a and Y believes b. People then form their judgment on what they think of X and Y.

I was born small, as so many things are. A marsupial perhaps. People came to me and reached inside me to pass things to each other. I helped them do that. When I was young I had no blood, and people moving things around inside me had to do it by feel.

No one knows anything. But I know less than that, because I thought I knew something, but it was wrong. So I know negatively. I unknow.

It's like being Calvin and watching Hobbes turn back into a stuffed doll.

Many years before, he had learned you could not trust anything you thought between two and five a.m.; in those dark hours the brain was deprived of certain fuels or functions necessary for right mentation. One's thoughts and moods darkened to a sometimes fugilin black. Better to sleep or, failing that, to discount in advance any thought or mood from those hours and see what a new day brought in the way of a fresh perspective.