perspective Quotes

“JUROR #3: He’s an old man. You saw him. Half the time he was confused. How could he be positive about … anything?”

“JUROR: #10: You’re not gonna’ tell me we’re supposed to believe this kid, knowing what he is.”

“Carmen smiled. ‘I am poor, but I am rich. I have my children, I have a garden with roses, and I have my faith and the memories of those who have gone before me. What more is there?‘”

“Two men looked out from prison bars, One saw the mud, the other saw stars.”

“Your challenge as a #GIRLBOSS is to dive headfirst into things without being too attached to the results. When your goal is to gain experience, perspective, and knowledge, failure is no longer a possibility. Failure is your invention. I believe that there is a silver lining in everything, and once you begin to see it, you’ll need sunglasses to combat the glare. It is she who listens to the rest of the world who fails, and it is she who has enough confidence to define success and failure for herself who succeeds.”

″‘Mama, she is poor and dirty...’ said Esperanza.” “But Mama interrupted. ‘When you scorn these people, you scorn Miguel, Hortensia, and Alfonso. And you embarrass me and yourself. As difficult as it is to accept, our lives are different now.‘”

“We see the world as it really is, and hope that one day all mankind might see the same.”

″‘He doesn’t smell right!’ he exclaimed. ‘He isn’t a rabbit at all! He isn’t real!’ ‘I am Real!’ said the little Rabbit. ‘I am Real! The Boy said so!’ And he nearly began to cry.”

“...the thing about portraits is, you need to show people the way they want to be seen. And I prefer to show people as I see them.”

″‘Everything is uglier up close,’ she said.”

″Paradigms are powerful because they create the lens through which we see the world.″

“The air at Base Camp seemed thick and rich and voluptuously saturated with oxygen compared to the brutally thin atmosphere of the camps above.”

″Each of us has many, many maps in our head, which can be divided into two main categories: maps of the way things are, or realities, and maps of the way things should be, or values. We interpret everything we experience through these mental maps. We seldom question their accuracy; we’re usually even unaware that we have them. We simply assume that the way we see things is the way they really are or the way they should be.″

“We all fail to appreciate each day just how much we already possess. Light, air, freedom, the companionship of friends.”

“The more you get set into your own world, the smaller your world becomes.”

“I’m just thankful for everything, all the blessings in my life, trying to stay that way. I think that’s the best way to start your day and finish your day. It keeps everything in perspective.”

It is not our part here to take thought only for a season, or for a few lives of Men, or for a passing age of the world. We should seek a final end of this menace, even if we do not hope to make one.

″‘I never thought of it that way,’ said Thacia, her eyes clouding. ‘Is that why, do you think, that so many of them aren’t cured?‘”

Everything isn’t everything

“When I was younger, I had wanted to be at the very center of all the action in New York, but I slowly came to realize that there is no one center. The center is everywhere - wherever people are living out their lives. It’s a city with a million centers.”

“It’s a great huge game of chess that’s being played—all over the world—if this is the world at all, you know.”

“Being old gave [Sophie] an entirely new view of Fanny. She was a lady who was still young and pretty, and she had found the hat shop as boring as Sophie did. But she had stuck with it and done her best, both with the shop and with the three girls—until Mr. Hatter had died. Then she had suddenly been afraid she was just like Sophie: old with no reason, and nothing to show for it.”

“Life, what is it but a dream?”

“If peace comes from seeing the whole, then misery stems from a loss of perspective.”

“George: I read somewhere that science fiction is really not science fiction at all…that you people are rearranging my genes so that everyone will be like everyone else.”

“I was thinking about framing, and how so much of what we think about our lives and our personal histories revolves around how we frame it. The lens we see it through, or the way we tell our own stories. We mythologize ourselves.”

“We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us even in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavour. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”

“It is undeniably the case that in our society we do not easily accept that death is a natural part of life, which results in a perpetual sense of insecurity and fear, and many are confused at the time of the death of a loved one, not knowing what they can do to help the one that has passed away or how to address their own grief. Exploring ways of overcoming our fear of death and adopting a creative approach at the time of bereavement, that is, focusing one’s energy on supporting the one that has passed away, are both extraordinary benefits of the insights and practices that are so beautifully expressed in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. When I think of these things I often remember the Dalai Lama saying: ‘When we look at life and death from a broader perspective, then dying is just like changing our clothes! When this body becomes old and useless, we die and take on a new body, which is fresh, healthy and full of energy! This need not be so bad!’”

“I wept because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet.”

I stand upon my desk to remind myself that we must constantly look at things in a different way.

“I turned and caught the briefest of moments in Maxon’s life. His mother, the beautiful Queen Amberly, pushed some stray hairs back into place.”

“I turned at the sound of my name. Maxon was jogging down the hall toward me. I felt like I was seeing him for the first time.”

″‘Aspen, I know you could do it. But you’re not a superhero. You can’t expect to be able to provide everything for everyone you love.‘”

″‘Why do you keep talking to my horse instead of to me?’ said the girl. ‘Excuse me, Tarkheena,’ said Bree (with just the slightest backward tilt of his ears), ‘but that’s Calormene talk. We’re free Narnians, Hwin and I, and I suppose, if you’re running away to Narnia, you want to be one too. In that case Hwin isn’t your horse any longer. One might just as well say you’re her human.’ The girl opened her mouth to speak and then stopped. Obviously she had not quite seen it in that light before.”

“Men are anxious to improve their circumstances, but are unwilling to improve themselves.”

“People are fulfilled to the extent that they create their world (which is a human world), and create it with their transforming labor”

″‘All this--’ she exclaimed, the sweep of her arm including the deepening blue of the sky, the shining lake in the distance, the snow-covered mountain far to the north. ‘So much! You must look at it all, Daniel, not just at the unhappy things.‘”

“The red mist of anger cleared suddenly from Daniel’s mind. He looked at the man who had been his leader. He saw the coarsened face with its tangle of dirty beard. He saw the hard mouth, the calculating little eyes. He saw a man he had never really looked at before.”

“Around a minor G-type star toward one edge of a medium-sized galaxy planets swung as they had for billions of years, under a modified inverse square law that shaped space. Four were big enough, as planets go, to be noticeable; the rest were pebbles, concealed in the fiery skirts of the primary or lost in the black reaches of space. All, as is always the case, were infected with that oddity of distorted entropy called life; on the third and fourth planets surface temperatures cycled around the freezing point of hydrogen monoxide; in consequence they had developed life forms similar enough to permit a degree of social contact.”

“Go then, there are other worlds than these.”

The notary who becomes a deputy, the hack playwright who produces a mock-Corneille, the eunuch who acquires a harem, the journeyman-general who by accident wins the decisive battle of an epoch. [...] All this is what men call genius, just as they call a painted face beauty and a richly attired figure majesty. They confound the brilliance of the firmament with the star-shaped footprints of a duck in the mud.

“What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, criscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.”

“God certainly knows of some happiness for us which He is going to bring out of the trouble, only we must have patience and not run away. And then all at once something happens and we see clearly ourselves that God has had some good thought in His mind all along; but because we cannot see things beforehand, and only know how dreadfully miserable we are, we think it is always going to be so.”

“I’ll continue to see things as a child. It’s not so far to fall.”

How do we, like Walt, permit our own true natures to speak? How do we strip ourselves of prejudices, habits, influences? The answer, my dear lads, is that we must constantly endeavor to find a new point of view.

It is understandable that the perspectives of men and women on safety are so different--men and women live in different worlds.

“The thoughtless, the ignorant, and indolent, seeing only the apparent effects of things and not the things themselves, talk of law, of fortune, and chance. Seeing a man grow rich, they say, “How lucky he is!” Observing another become intellectual they exclaim, “How highly favored he is!” And noting the saintly character and wide influence of another, they remark, “How chance aids him at every turn!” They don’t see the trials and failures and the struggles which these men have voluntarily encountered in order to gain their experience; have no knowledge of the sacrifices they have made, of the undaunted efforts they have put forth, of the faith they have exercised, that they might overcome the apparently insurmountable, and realize the vision of their heart. They do not know the darkness and the heart aches; they only see the light and the Joy, and they call it “luck”; do not see the longing arduous journey, but only behold the pleasant goal, and call it “good fortune”; do not understand the process, but only perceive the result, and call it “chance”.”

“Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You’d have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking: Well, at least I’m not dead.”

“But thinking about and being aware of our mortality creates real perspective and urgency. It doesn’t need to be depressing. Because it’s invigorating.”

“How we interpret the events in our lives, our perspective, is the framework for our forthcoming response—whether there will even be one or whether we’ll just lie there and take it.”

“Each time, you’ll learn something. Each time, you’ll develop strength, wisdom, and perspective. Each time, a little more of the competition falls away. Until all that is left is you: the best version of you.”

“Think progress, not perfection.”

“Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.”

“Where the head goes, the body follows. Perception precedes action. Right action follows the right perspective.”

“We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.”

“Obviously, Doctor ... you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl. ”

“When we see these things (suffering), we realize that not only do we suffer, but so do many of our human brothers and sisters. So when we look at the same event from a wider perspective, we will reduce the worrying and our own suffering.”

“Mindfulness puts an end to such a limited perspective. The Buddha faced his own suffering directly and discovered the path of liberation. Don’t run away from things that are unpleasant in order to embrace things that are pleasant. Put your hands in the earth. Face the difficulties and grow new happiness.”

“The more you act on your faith in God, the more you will see his way for you.”

“We missed the reality and the beauty of the forest because we were diverted by the ugliness of some of its trees.”

“So what do people see when they read that well-behaved women rarely make history? Do they imagine good-time girls in stiletto heels or do-good girls carrying clipboards and passing petitions? Do they envision an out-of-control hobbyist or a single mother taking down a drunk in a bar? I suspect that it depends on where they stand themselves.”

“God sees us from the perspective of who He created us to be, but we too often see ourselves from our limitations instead of our possibilities.”

“The life he knew was a clean orderly sane responsible affair. Now a falling beam had shown him that life was fundamentally none of these things.”

“I never had the thought of Mr. Rabbit being an imaginary friend. That is so cool. I love the story much more from that perspective as the notion adds a layer of depth, and also because it removes a bit of a ‘squick.”

“good publicity is preferable to bad, but from a bottom-line perspective, bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity at all. Controversy, in short, sells.”

“Whatever you’re facing, it is under your feet. It is not permanent. It’s temporary. The power that is for you is greater than any power that comes against you. Keep the right perspective. You and God are a majority. You are armed and dangerous. The problem may have formed, but it is not going to prosper.”

We don’t get to him or his perspective about what’s going on. The sisters are typical: the good sister who takes care of things and the bad sister who hangs with the wrong crowd.

“It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective.”

“We can’t change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.”

“Encouragement requires empathy and seeing the world from your spouse’s perspective. We must first learn what is important to our spouse. Only then can we give encouragement.”

“...we often mistake love for fireworks - for drama and dysfunction. But real love is very quiet, very still. It’s boring, if seen from the perspective of high drama. Love is deep and calm - and constant.”

“If you were a cloud, and sailed up there, You’d sail on the water as blue as air. And you’d see me here in the fields and say: “Doesn’t the sky look green today?”

“She explains to her sister how to send a letter: ‘There are big blue boxes on the street with eagles on them, put your letter to me there and a man dressed in blue with and eagle sigil on his breast will take it from the box and bring it to me.”

“Sometimes, all you have to do is shift your perspective to see someone else’s truth.”

“But it is helpful to remember that our perspective is our world. And our external circumstances don’t need to change in order for our perspective to change.”