Quotes About Perspective

You know, you don't have to have permanent opinions. You can think, every morning, 'I love the world' and go to bed every night thinking, 'I hate the world.'

Nothing shortens a journey so pleasantly as an account of misfortunes at which the hearer is permitted to laugh.

It's the easiest thing in the world to assume that what seems so obvious at one moment in time is a hard, perpetual fact of life.

There's so much light in Broughty Ferry. I think the humour in Glasgow is darker, because it's much more gloomy, there's a perpetual misery there.

I think of Alan Thicke as Perry Como without the excitement.

I have my own cosmology that's kind of like an esoteric mix of a lot of different things that work for me and that to me, are worth exploring. There is a little bit of the archetypal Christianity that I've kind of reconciled because when you're raised that way, inevitably that infrastructure will persist into your adulthood.

There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.

One person's car is another person's scenery.

Just because you say something doesn't make it controversial, and it doesn't make you a bad person.

I think what's always been interesting to me than the science and the criminality with this job is what happens to your persona, your disposition, after day in and day out dealing with life and death.

The 'Billy On The Street' persona is truly inspired by who I was as a child - obviously not having an adult perspective on the world.

Yves treats my wife as if she were a plaything, and continually assures me that she is charming. I find her as exasperating as the cicalas on my roof; and when I am alone at home, side by side with this little creature twanging the strings of her long-necked guitar, facing this marvellous panorama of pagodas and mountains, I am overcome by sadness almost to tears.

I've had at least my share of tragedy, but I have had far more than my share of happiness.

In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.

We are not physical beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a physical experience.

I've been called worse things by better people.

For me, the response is simple. All ideas are false, that is to say contradictory and irrational, if one takes them in an exclusive and absolute sense, or if one allows oneself to be carried away by that sense; all are true, susceptible to realization and use, if one takes them together with others, or in evolution.

One day you'll discover that the opinions of worthless people are worthless.

The Universe may be as great as they say. But it wouldn't be missed if it didn't exist.

A bit beyond perception's reach I sometimes believe I see that life is two locked boxes each containing the other's key.

Art is solving problems that cannot be formulated before they have been solved. The shaping of the question is part of the answer.

It ought to be plain how little you gain by getting excited and vexed. You'll always be late for the previous train, and always on time for the next.

THE WISDOM OF THE SPHERES How instructive is a star! It can teach us from afar just how small each other are.

ASTRO-GYMNASTICS Go on a starlit night, stand on your head, leave your feet dangling outwards into space, and let the starry firmament you tread be, for the moment, your elected base. Feel Earth's colossal weight of ice and granite, of molten magma, water, iron, and lead; and briefly hold this strangely solid planet balanced upon your strangely solid head.