Perspective Quotes

Water in the boat is the ruin of the boat, but water under the boat is its support.

When actors encounter a mishap during a stage performance,they transform it for good purpose by employing a technique called,“use the difficulty.” How can you “use the difficulty” in your life?

Gina Greenlee

It seemed the more I knew about people the more I knew about the strange magic hidden in their hearts.

Rudolfo Anaya

Science cuts two ways, of course; its products can be used for both good and evil. But there's no turning back from science. The early warnings about technological dangers also come from science.

Carl Sagan

To accept the lively, the messy, and the unexpected things in our days, knowing that God sees them and has an eternal perspective, is to say with confidence I receive your timing.

Emily P. Freeman

And as I looked at the star, I realised what millions of other people have realised when looking at stars. We’re tiny. We don’t matter. We’re here for a second and then gone the next. We’re a sneeze in the life of the universe.

Danny Wallace

True inspiration unfolds itself, not by force or it becomes fake. True intuition is also the ability to be observant.

Chris Messner

Maybe belief is the biggest lie. In ages past, the earliest philosophers tried to explain the stars in the sky and the world around them. One of them conceived of the notion that the universe was mounted on giant crystal spheres controlled by a giant machine, which explained the movements of the heavens. He was laughed at and told that such a machine would be so huge and noisy that everyone would hear it. He simply replied that we are born with that noise all around us, and that we are so used to hearing it that we cannot hear it at all.

Dan Abnett

Because that world's gone. The world where people walked around whistling that music. All the madrigal singers in the world can't make that other one real again. It's like dinosaurs. We can put them back together perfectly, bone for bone, but we don't know what they smelled like, what kind of sounds they made, or how big they really looked standing in the grass under all those fossil fern trees. Even the sunlight must have been different, and the wind. What can bones tell you about a kind of wind that doesn't blow anymore?

Peter S Beagle

Maybe it's just that some of us have had certain facts and truths slapped up against our heads so hard and so often that we have to see them and pay our respects to their reality.

Ralph Ellison

How you look it is pretty much how you'll see it

Rasheed Ogunlaru

Those two little words -- says you -- are the most powerful argument in any discipline: theology, philosphy, even domestic harmony. They are powerful because they are true. Whenever you say something, it is you who says it. You. And what do you know?

J. Mark Bertrand

Perspective was my secret weapon, and books gave me plenty of ammunition.

Ian McNulty

Yefgenii said, "The Americans spent millions of dollars designing a pen that would work in space. What did we do?" Gevorkian's head was down, his eyes were down. "What did we do?"Gevorkian lifted his head "We used pencils.""We used pencils.

Jed Mercurio

In painting, three things must be considered - the position of the viewer, the position of the object viewed, and the position of the light that illuminates the object.

Lynn Cullen

We have to care what someone thinks of us. We are incapable of seeing ourselves [sometimes].

Darnell Lamont Walker

Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this, they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation from God. When the economists say the present-day relations--the relations of bourgeois production--are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature. These relations therefore are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus, there has been history, but there is no longer any. There has been history, since there were institutions of feudalism, and in these institutions of feudalism we find quite different relations of production from those of bourgeois society, which the economists try to pass off as natural and, as such, eternal.

Karl Marx

As small as a world as large as alone.

E.E. Cummings

Once the blinders are off, it's rather hard to go back to seeing things the way you used to.

Mercedes Lackey

If there’s one thing I have learned it’s that if you carry on as though nothing strange is happening, it usually stops being strange

Sarah-Kate Lynch

Each of us sees things not as they are but as we are.

Jack Provonsha

Being put in our place by something larger, older, greater than ourselves is not a humiliation; it should be accepted as a relief from our insanely hopeful ambitions for our lives.

Alain de Botton

I am grateful for the rare opportunities to look at my circumstances from a higher perspective, one detached from the dim outlook I normally insist on seeing. These periodic glimpses show me life's grandeur.

Richelle E. Goodrich

Wide horizons lead the soul to broad ideas; circumscribed horizons engender narrow ideas; this sometimes condemns great hearts to become small minded.Broad ideas hated by narrow ideas,—this is the very struggle of progress.

Victor Hugo

Nations tend to see the other side's war atrocities as systemic and indicative of their culture and their own atrocities as justified or the acts of stressed combatants. In my travels, I sense a smoldering resentment towards WWII Japanese behavior among some Americans. Ironically, these feelings are strongest among the younger American generation that did not fight in WWII. In my experience, the Pacific vets on both sides have made their peace. And in terms of judgments, I will leave it to those who were there. As Ray Gallagher, who flew on both atomic missions against Hiroshima and Nagasaki argues, "When you're not at war you're a good second guesser. You had to live those years and walk that mile.

James D. Bradley

...consider yourself a functional character in someone else's novel - a background character - a person on the street - that's the perspective ...

John Geddes

...you've lost perspective? Well, get it back - God alone has the third person point of view in this life ...

John Geddes

Let me be one of the upward and outward lookers, not one of the downward and inward lookers.

Alfred Edersheim

There is no hour that has not its births of gladness and despair, no morning brightness that does not bring new sickness to desolation as well as new forces to genius and love. There are so many of us, and our lots are so different, what wonder that Nature's mood is often in harsh contrast with the great crisis of our lives?

George Eliot

...what happens tomorrow is the future but what happened yesterday is already part of on-going history...

Peggy Herbert

The worm in the radish doesn't think there is anything sweeter.

Sholem Aleichem

Narratives are the primary way in which we make sense of our lives, as opposed to, for example schema,cognition, beliefs, constructs. Definition of narrative include the important element of giving meaning to events and experiences over time by connecting them as a developing, continuing story.

Jacqui Stedmon

To me art means power to sway people not with my words but with a mere picture. Art means expression, not my own but of the subjects. Art means truth; because when you see a picture you see all that is real. Art is exposure, showing things in a way they haven’t been seen before.

Author points out in Woodrow Wilson the flipside of the positive we might call big picture vision. He observes that as college president Wilson resorted to the language of a national crusade when he met resistance in a local, academic issue.

David Pietrusza

Sometimes one waits too long for the perfect moment before snapping the picture. You never realize that you needed was to change perspective.

Miguel Syjuco

So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners?

David Mitchell

One of the best gifts you can give to someone, is a wider perspective. It's also one of the best gifts you can receive. So if you have given someone a wider perspective, don't feel bad about it (about taking their blindfolds off and having to watch them cringe in the newfound sunlight); I know it's hard, but you're doing them a lasting favor. And a wider perspective can be difficult for you yourself to accept, in the beginning (during the time that you squint while the sunlight stings your own eyes), but later you'll find yourself coming back to it, even if you abandoned it as something worthless; you'll look for it, one day. Or it will grow on you. Perspective.

C. JoyBell C.

The scene [Bruegel's 'Landscape with the Fall of Icarus'] is filled with a vast field, and a cow and a farmer plowing. In the left-hand corner is a tiny ocean the size of a palm, and there, I can barely make it out, the two legs of a man who fell headlong into the sea. This is called the Fall of Icarus. Compared to everyday life, the fall of an idealist who flew too high with candle-wax wings is an unremarkable tragedy.

Hwang Sok-yong

Leave it to a vampire to think a healthy guy in his late thirties or early forties was on his deathbed.

MaryJanice Davidson

Just say it: I'm angry and no one will like me. God: No, I will not say that. But don't you think we ached for you to find a love you could share your whole life with? I used your teachers to encourage you creatively when the church could not... I worked with whatever I got my hands on. Can you see that?

Susan E. Isaacs

If peace comes from seeing the whole,then misery stems from a loss of perspective.We begin so aware and grateful. The sun somehow hangs there in the sky. The little bird sings. The miracle of life just happens. Then we stub our toe, and in that moment of pain, the whole world is reduced to our poor little toe. Now, for a day or two, it is difficult to walk. With every step, we are reminded of our poor little toe.Our vigilance becomes: Which defines our day—the pinch we feel in walking on a bruised toe, or the miracle still happening?It is the giving over to smallness that opens us to misery. In truth, we begin taking nothing for granted, grateful that we have enough to eat, that we are well enough to eat. But somehow, through the living of our days, our focus narrows like a camera that shutters down, cropping out the horizon, and one day we’re miffed at a diner because the eggs are runny or the hash isn’t seasoned just the way we like.When we narrow our focus, the problem seems everything. We forget when we were lonely, dreaming of a partner. We forget first beholding the beauty of another. We forget the comfort of first being seen and held and heard. When our view shuts down, we’re up in the night annoyed by the way our lover pulls the covers or leaves the dishes in the sink without soaking them first.In actuality, misery is a moment of suffering allowed to become everything. So, when feeling miserable, we must look wider than what hurts. When feeling a splinter, we must, while trying to remove it, remember there is a body that is not splinter, and a spirit that is not splinter, and a world that is not splinter.

Mark Nepo

It's HE-RO," the boy argued."No," the girl insisted,"it's HER-O.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

You have to thank God for the seemingly good and the seemingly bad because really, you don't know the difference [until we get to heaven].

Jennie Allen

It is well known that stone can think, because the whole of electronics is based on that fact, but in some universes men spend ages looking for other intelligences in the sky without once looking under their feet. That is because they've got the time-span all wrong. From stone's point of view the universe is hardly created and mountain ranges are bouncing up and down like organ-stops while continents zip backward and forward in general high spirits, crashing into each other from the sheer joy of momentum and getting their rocks off. It is going to be quite some time before stone notices its disfiguring skin disease and starts to scratch, which is just as well.

Terry Pratchett

We often think that there is just one way to look at things - the way we always have. In fact, there are an infinite number of ways to look at most everything. An open mind allows for a multitude of perspectives from which to choose in any given moment. That suppleness of mind allows for true choice, and opens us to a whole new realm of possibility.

Jeffrey R. Anderson

Real? Real depends upon your perspective, Annabelle. People never see life exactly the same way. The world is what you think it is.

Richelle E. Goodrich

Oh, what can you do with a man like that? What can you do? How can you dissuade his eye in a crowd from seeking out the cheek with acne, the infirm hand; how can you teach him to respond to the inestimable greatness of the race, the harsh surface beauty of life; how can you put his finger for him on the obdurate truths before which fear and horror are powerless? The sea that morning was iridescent and dark. My wife and my sister were swimming--Diana and Helen--and I saw their uncovered heads, black and gold in the dark water. I saw them come out and I saw that they were naked, unshy, beautiful, and full of grace, and I watched the naked women walk out of the sea.

John Cheever

the greater number of a man's errors come before him disguised under the specious form of necessity; then, after error has been committed in a moment of excitement, of delirium, or of fear, we see that we might have avoided and escaped it.

Alexandre Dumas

...you have changed everything for me- you rearranged the furniture and now you've changed the view from my window!...

John Geddes

...I look out at the world through your transparent face...

John Geddes

The study of the past helps us to appreciate that the ideas and values of our own age are just as provisional and transient as those of bygone ages. The intelligent and reflective engagement with the thought of a bygone era ultimately subverts any notion of "chronological snobbery". Reading texts from the past makes it clear that what we now term "the past" was once "the present", which proudly yet falsely regarded itself as having found the right intellectual answers and moral values that had eluded its predecessors.

C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius

I believe there no surer path to leaping dramatically forward in your career than to earn a Ph.D. in the humanities. Because the thought leaders in our industry are not the ones who plodded dully, step by step, up the career ladder. The leaders are the ones who took chances and developed unique perspectives.

Damon Horowitz

It doesn’t take objectivity to know what you want, and you’re not objective enough to know what you need.

Amy Neftzger

There were always people who struggled their way to the top of the heap, no matter how much that heap looked like garbage when seen from the outside.

Michelle Sagara West

How Horrid" has a slightly facetious tone that strikes me as Wildean. It appears to embrace the actual horror--puberty, public disgrace--then at the last second nimbly sidesteps it, laughing.

Alison Bechdel

Sometimes there is a microcosm and a macrocosm, and if you're dyslexic like me you can't tell the difference.

Bruce Bickford

I’m supposed to figure out if the glass is half full or half empty,” I told her.Without a moment’s hesitation, in a split second, my grandmother shrugged and said: “It depends on if you’re drinking or pouring.

Bill Cosby

From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck, drag him a quarter of a million miles out, and say, 'Look at that, you son of a bitch.

Ed Mitchell

The trouble with you people is that you've been here for thirty million years and your perspectives are all wrong. You miss so much of the transitory beauty of life.

J.G. Ballard

Nothing can be appreciated in a vacuum.

Chuck Klosterman

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Perspective Quotes

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