Best 2585 quotes in «perspective quotes» category

How small we feel with our petty ambitions and strivings in the presence of the great elemental forces of Nature!

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

Human material culture - the buildings and roads and works that would strike any human as an obvious sign of intelligence - had for years seemed like part of an elaborate mating ritual to the starlings, useless and flamboyant as the peacock's tail.

...I always took the rearmost seat in the classroom - it gave me a good view of things. And I must confess, the location taught me more about human nature and justice than could be learned from the professors' lectures.

I am living in world full of lost hope and discrimination. I am living a life in which social equality does not exist and I am not sure that it ever can, or if once upon a time it ever did.

I am most right because I realize I am most wrong

I am so small. A billion tons of durosteel and nanometal move through the heavens, and I have never been beyond Mars's atmosphere. They are like specks of silver in an ocean of ink. And I am so much less. But those specs could ravage Mars. They could destroy a moon. Those specks rule the ink.

I am sure there are other versions of happiness, but this one is mine.

I am very happy to see the enemy wish to avoid our coming to him. – Napoleon

I believe in Divine Connection. Some encounters are brief, but it can expand your perspective, and subsequently change the course of your life.

I believe in miracles because I am surrounded by miracles every day. My very existence is a miracle.

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.

I can remember we were happy, I say. Happy to have our own house. ‘Can you recall anything specific, like a detail, or is it more a feeling you remember?’ Anybody can remember details if you ask them to, I say, but it doesn’t mean it actually happened that way. I wait for him to make eye contact, which he does. ‘You have a point, Junior,’ he says.’ You’re right.

I can only afford five apples instead of eight. I’m so broke!” exclaimed one woman. “I know, right,” replied another. Their conversation made me sick.

I can't change the world, but I can always change my point of view.

I can tell you this: there will be other girls, other disasters. And there will be nights to come, his life mostly behind him, when he will long to hurt like that again.

I couldn't have done 16 months of deployment without a sense of irony. N

I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs. You refer to yourself in order to understand other people. That's the novelist's gift, isn't it?

I didn't say you could have perfect experiences, I said you could have experiences.

Ideas and dreams are only valuable after they have been acted on.

I’d often wondered, absorbed in piles of research, if the magic of history would be lost if we could go back and live it. Did we varnish the past and make heroes of average men and imagine beauty and valor where there was only dirge and desperation? Or like the old man looking back on his youth, remembering only the things he’d seen, did the angle of our gaze sometimes cause us to miss the bigger picture? I didn’t think time offered clarity so much as time stripped away the emotion that colored memories. The Irish Civil War had happened eighty years before I’d traveled to Ireland. Not so far that the people had forgotten it, but enough time had passed that more—or maybe less—cynical eyes could pull the details apart and look at them for what they were.

I'd never had a mind for math. ... It was a logic that made little sense to me. In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or a formula or an equation. It was a story.

I didn't lose anyone, for everyone that I lost was never really a loss, unless it was death well then I had to have words with God.

I do have to prioritize my end-of-the-world documents.

I don’t see the me that you see. I wish for just a lit­tle bit I could climb into you and then you could climb into me and then we could tell each other what we saw there.

I don’t face sadness when friends leave because friends always come back. Yet when lovers leave, it’s like death. You’ll never see them again.

I don't pretend reality is the same for everyone.

I entrain myself (when I remember to) by tuning in to higher frequencies in the ether, in my soul, everywhere I go, always accessible, always helpful for obtaining a higher perspective in a matter of minutes.

I don’t write poetry. I reiterate conversations.

If everything was perfect in your life won't it be a predictable one. Life is unpredictable chaotic and madness but that's what makes life interesting won't you agree?

If anything I urge you to live bravely and beyond your own comfort zone.

I fear that we live in an ahistorical age in which we believe that we are so wise that we no longer need the lessons of the past, perhaps most disturbingly of all that technology has put us beyond the lessons of the past.

I felt the same profound thrill it gives me to see trees and grassland waist-high under flood water - as if the usual order of the world had shifted slightly, and entered a new phase

If having problems feels like a problem to you, it may not be the problems themselves, but the way you think about them that is the problem.

If I'd defined success very narrowly, limiting it to peak, high-visibility experiences, I would have felt very unsuccessful and unhappy during those years. Life is just a lot better if you feel you're having 10 wins a day rather than a win every 10 years or so.

I felt myself becoming angry too easily. I once saw a couple at a restaurant, and I could tell from their mannerisms that they were having some type of disagreement. I got mad at the guy and wanted to tell him, "Come on – appreciate your wife!

If he (John Adams) could not control events, he could at least record them for posterity – perhaps the ultimate form of control.

I figure I'll win the fight in twenty years or so anyways when I end up with a decent life and their unemployed and living at home.

If I only looked at what I've lost, I'd never be able to see what I have.

If life throws you a few bad notes, don't let them interrupt your song.

If I walk along a shore towards a ship which has run aground, and the funnel or masts merge into the forest bordering on the sand dune, there will be a moment when these details suddenly become part of the ship, and indissolubly fused with it. As I approached, I did not perceive resemblances or proximities which finally came together to form a continuous picture of the upper part of the ship. I merely felt that the look of the object was on the point of altering, that something was imminent in this tension, as a storm is imminent in storm clouds. Suddenly the sight before me was recast in a manner satisfying to my vague expectation. Only afterwards did I recognize, as justifications for the change, the resemblance and contiguity of what I call ‘stimuli’— namely the most determinate phenomena, seen at close quarters and with which I compose the ‘true’ world. ‘How could I have failed to see that these pieces of wood were an integral part of the ship? For they were of the same colour as the ship, and fitted well enough into its superstructure.’ But these reasons for correct perception were not given as reasons beforehand. The unity of the object is based on the foreshadowing of an imminent order which is about to spring upon us a reply to questions merely latent in the landscape. It solves a problem set only in the form of a vague feeling of uneasiness, it organizes elements which up to that moment did not belong to the same universe and which, for that reason, as Kant said with profound insight, could not be associated. By placing them on the same footing, that of the unique object, synopsis makes continuity and resemblance between them possible. An impression can never by itself be associated with another impression.

If not for tragedy, tyrants, and injustice, there would be nothing to awaken and inspire dormant heroes. There is always a balance. Always.

If one comes to the sense that they have arrived, they no longer feel the need to submit themselves to the process of learning and growing. This is a dangerous mindset to carry. The day that we stop learning is the day we stop living.

If my mind was in your body going through the same circumstances. I would act differently, and likewise. Judging in nature is separation.

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.

If religion had never existed, what then, would people have killed for in the name of religion? What would a martyr have died for? What would the masses believe in?

If only people put as much energy into helping people as they do into creating drama.

If only you could see the greatness in yourself, you wouldn't envy the greatness in others.

I found you in our truth. Running sideways for a broken muse who loved strangers as much as alcohol.

If people only understood the incredible power of a shift in perspective. To be different you must think, feel, and act differently. Change your perceptions, change how you feel about things, and then take action.