Best 2585 quotes in «perspective quotes» category

No one could endure lasting adversity if it continued to have the same force as when it first hit us. We are all tied to Fortune, some by a loose and golden chain, and others by a tight one of baser metal: but what does it matter? We are all held in the same captivity, and those who have bound others are themselves in bonds - unless you think perhaps that the left-hand chain is lighter. One man is bound by high office, another by wealth; good birth weighs down some, and a humble origin others; some bow under the rule of other men and some under their own; some are restricted to one place by exile, others by priesthoods: all life is a servitude. So you have to get used to your circumstances, complain about them as little as possible, and grasp whatever advantage they have to offer: no condition is so bitter that a stable mind cannot find some consolation in it.

No one event will ever be the ‘be all or end all’. It’s never a big deal, so stop ever making it one. Put every challenge in perspective and push forward.

No one looks at the mountains. But they were there, making them all look silly.

No perspective, no perception. New perspective, new perception.

Nor did he care about his childhood, for certainly I never heard him speak of it. I once questioned him about his early days and he would not answer. ‘What is the egg to the eagle?’ he asked me…

Not all brilliant people win in life and not all people who won in life are brilliant.

Not enough books focus on how a culture responds to radically new ideas or discovery. Especially in the biography genre, they tend to focus on all the sordid details in the life of the person who made the discovery. I find this path to be voyeuristic but not enlightening. Instead, I ask, After evolution was discovered, how did religion and society respond? After cities were electrified, how did daily life change? After the airplane could fly from one country to another, how did commerce or warfare change? After we walked on the Moon, how differently did we view Earth? My larger understanding of people, places and things derives primarily from stories surrounding questions such as those.

Not every artistic person should have to be a photographer, but every photographer should be artistic.

Not by discovering new wow things you are able to understand the truth about nature, but by changing the very fundamental way of perceiving anything you've ever seen in daily life.

Not having any drink about ain’t the same as not understanding the need for one. Times like these change a body’s perspective.

Not every murderer is known, not every death is recorded, not every human being in the history of mankind is remembered and not every God’s name is memorised by me. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist, Dr.Mukherjee.

Not everything is about you. In fact, most things aren’t. What a relief, right?

Nothing can be appreciated in a vacuum.

Nothing is clear now. Something must be the matter with my way of viewing things. I have no middle view. Either I fix on a detail and see it as thought it were magnified -- a leaf with all its veins perceived, the fine hairs on a man's hands -- or else the world recedes and becomes blurred, artificial, indefinite, an abstract painting of a world. The darkening sky is hugely blue, gashed with rose, blood, flame from the volcano or wound or flower of the lowering sun. The wavering green, the sea of grass, piercingly bright. Black tree trunks, contorted, arching over the river.

Nothing new about death, nothing new about deaths caused militarily. We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo on that night of March 9-10 than went up in vapor at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

Not merely is the art of the second half of the fifth century influenced by the same experience which formed the ideas of the Sophists; a spiritual movement such as theirs, with its stimulating humanism, was bound to have a direct effect upon the outlook of the poets and artists. When we come to the fourth century there is no branch of art in which their influence cannot be traced. Nowhere is the new spirit more striking than in the new type of athlete which, with Praxiteles and Lysippus, now supplants the manly ideal of Polycletus. Their Hermes and Apoxyomenos have nothing of the heroic, of aristocratic austerity and disdain about them; they give the impression of being dancers rather than athletes. Their intellectuality is expressed not merely in their heads; their whole appearance emphasizes that ephemeral quality of all that is human which the Sophists had pointed out and stressed. Their whole being is dynamically charged and full of latent force and movement. When you try to look at them they will not allow you to rest in any one position, for the sculptor has discarded all thought of principal view-points; on the contrary, these works underline the incompleteness and momentariness of each ephemeral aspect to such a degree as to force the spectator to be altering his position constantly until he has been round the whole figure. He is thus made aware of the relativity of each single aspect, just as the Sophists became aware that every truth, every norm and every standard has a perspective element and alters as the view-point alters. Art now frees itself from the last fetters of the geometrical; the very last traces of frontality now disappear. The Apoxyomenos is completely absorbed in himself, leads his own life and takes no notice of the spectator. The individualism and relativism of the Sophists, the illusionism and subjectivity of contemporary art, alike express the spirit of economic liberalism and democracy—the spiritual condition of people who reject the old aristocratic attitude towards life, with all its gravity and magnificence, because they think they owe everything to themselves and nothing to their ancestors, and who give vent to all their emotions and passions with complete lack of restraint because so whole-heartedly convinced that man is the measure of all things.

... not only did perspective elevate art to a "science"... the subjective visual impression was indeed so far rationalized that this very impression could itself become the foundation for a solidly grounded and yet, in an entirely modern sense, "infinite" experiential world. One could even compare the function of Renaissance perspective with that of critical philosophy... The result was a translation of psychophysiological space into mathematical space; in other words, an objectification of the subjective.

No two people ever view the world from exactly the same perspective, understand things the same way, human or not. The best we can ever do is try.

Not until you change your lens, true beauty shall always look ugly to you!

No two people see things the same.

No wonder the sky had to be blotted out by advertisements. The stars drowned with lights. If everyone could see beyond Coalition horizons, perhaps they'd see the titans of humanity for what they were: tiny creatures, smaller than insects, and in the scale of things, every bit as insignificant.

Numbers never lie, after all: they simply tell different stories depending on the math of the tellers.

Od toliko razlicitosti, svi smo mi iste boje kada krvarimo.

Often it isn't the mountains ahead that wear you out, it's the little pebble in your shoe.

Of his first enemy encounter, Gen. Grant said that after his initial fear, "My heart resumed its place." Grant said he suddenly realized his potential enemy he had been "as much afraid of me as I had been of him.

O: Hey youngman, you should respect me! Y: Hey oldman, you should understand me!

Oh, the last time how clearly you see everything; as though a magnifying light had been turned on it. And you grieve because you hadn’t held it tighter when you had it every day.

Oh, what darkness does great prosperity cast over our minds!

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.

Once you understand nature, you’ll understand everything perceptively.

One can talk good and shower down roses, but it's the receiver that has to walk through the thorns, and all its false expectations.

One is often unconsciously surrounded by one’s own personal reality

One just has to look at the thing from a perspective that interests you personally.

One mark of originality that can win canonical status for a literary work is strangeness that we either never altogether assimilate, or that becomes such a given that we are blinded to its idiosyncrasies.

One of Lincoln's intimates as a presidential candidate urged him to make no promises and not to part with those kind words which could be interpreted as promises.

Oneness is not sameness.

one must not prostrate oneself before the minor impossibilities, otherwise the major impossibilities would never come into view.

One must always forgive another's passion.

One of George H. W. Bush's early teachers at Andover wrote, "At the moment he is intellectually immature for his powers of reasoning are not entirely developed.

One of the chief values reading history, this is the author, is its capacity to "provoke renegade thoughts".

One of the main purposes of university education is to escape from the Zeitgeist, from the mean, narrow, provincial spirit which is constantly assuring us that we are at the peak of human achievement, that we stand on the edge of unprecedented prosperity or an unparalleled catastrophe; that the next summit conference is going to be the most fateful in history or that the leader of the day is either the greatest, or the most disastrous, of all time. It is a liberation of the spirit to acquire perspective, to recognize that every generation is confronted by problems of the utmost subjective urgency, but that an objective grading is probably impossible; to learn that the same moral predicaments and the same ideas have been explored before. One need read very little in political theory to become aware of recurrences and repetitions.

One of the greatest obstacles to success is the belief is that your future is predetermined. It isn’t. You decide the outcomes through your decisions and actions.

One of the powerful functions of a library — any library — lies in its ability to take us away from worlds that are familiar and comfortable and into ones which we can neither predict nor control, to lead us down new roads whose contours and vistas provide us with new perspectives. Sometimes, if we are fortunate, those other worlds turn out to have more points of familiarity with our own than we had thought. Sometimes we make connections back to familiar territory and when we have returned, we do so supplied with new perspectives, which enrich our lives as scholars and enhance our role as teachers. Sometimes the experience takes us beyond our immediate lives as scholars and teachers, and the library produces this result particularly when it functions as the storehouse of memory, a treasury whose texts connect us through time to all humanity." [Browsing in the Western Stacks, Harvard Library Bulletin NS 6(3): 27-33, 1995]

One thing that I had loved in Paraguay was the ironic grass that showed the tip of its nose between the pavements of the capital, that slipped in on behalf of the invisible but ever-present virgin forest to see if man still held the town, if the hour had not come to send all those stones tumbling. - from Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine St. Exupery (1939)

Only the beautiful can acknowledge all that is beautiful, and only the ugly can acknowledge all that is ugly as being beautiful.

(on learning Westlife had beaten Oasis, U2 and The Beatles in an album chart battle in November 2006): There is no God.

On our difficult paths we need truth to speak louder than the lies of despair.

Open your mind a little, don't believe everything you hear, see or read, the world is so caught up in trying to avoid the topics that matter that you'll lose yourself trying to become like it.

On the Rules of Perspective A bad trick. Mistake. Dishonesty. These are the views of Braque. Why? Braque rejected perspective. Why? Someone who spends his life drawing profiles will end up believing that man has one eye, Braque felt. Braque wanted to take full possession of objects. He said as much in published interviews. Watching the small shiny planes of the landscape recede out of his grasp filled Braque with loss so he smashed them. Nature morte, said Braque.

Our eyes captures thousands of beautiful pictures everyday.