Best 2585 quotes in «perspective quotes» category

I never want to waste time. After all, we're just passing observers, as insignificant to these giant formations as a speck of dust. So we might as well appreciate the view and enjoy the journey

In going back we must take our present selves with us: the mind has taken a different colour, and this is thrown back upon our past.

In many ways, the title American is an oxymoron because one may look it on the outside but not feel it on the inside.

In my experience, shifting one’s mental outlook (perspective), even slightly, can significantly change the trajectory and reveal the sun coming up beyond the dark horizon.

Inner peace is more a question of cultivating perspective, meaning, and wisdom even as life touches you with its pain.

In order to be successful you must decide to be intentional about what you do, how you live, and who you are becoming.

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.

I noticed that he was an Irish setter, rust-colored. He noticed that I was a Welsh sculptor, buff-colored (no, really, what did he notice? how does he think?) I reflected that he was probably a nice dog from a good home (bourgeois dog) but with certain unfortunate habits like jumping on people from high windows (rationalization: he is a member of the television generation and thus -)

Instead of asking yourself what you should do, ask yourself what you want to do.

Instead of looking for love, look to love.

Institutions and cultures are not immortal. Humans, Christian and non-Christian, are. Compared to us, our country is a gnat.

Integrity is something we show, not proclaim.

In ten years time will you look back at your past week and be glad how you chose to spend it?

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?

In the end, life is about collecting experiences and looking for the lesson and blessing in each one. Yet we are never to carry these experiences on our backs, only in our hearts. One will hold us back, while the other will keep us moving forward.

In the fluid world of 1919, it was possible to dream of great change, or have nightmares about the collapse of order.

In the little world in which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice. He may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stance as many hands high according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter.

In the perspective of our species, life has favored humanity as a whole by promoting as much wealth of variety and options as possible, and has distributed everything using the four winds. Life has given mankind everything it has, without segregation and without consideration of which characteristic or quality best suits the situations or the periods. Only by having the totality of human characteristics and options can we hope to deal with all periods to come. Our collective is our key to survival and well-being.

In the success equation, subtraction comes before multiplication or addition. You must sow before you can reap a harvest.

Inventions are not solely the making of material things, inventions are also the mental unleashing of ideas by a genuis with a sixth sense.

Invest time, energy, and money into increasing your knowledge and wisdom so you can become the best you can be – it’s the best investment you could make.

In times of change and danger, when there is a quicksand of fear under one's reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present. John Dos Passos

Investing in yourself is one of the foundations for better relationships, health, happiness, success, and prosperity.

In wartime, she thought to herself, you don’t call a death murder.

I prefer feeling insignificant," said Jess. "I don't believe that." "I didn't say worthless, I said insignificant, as in the grand scheme of things." "But why?" "Because humans have such a complex. We're so self-involved. You have to get out to a place like this to remember how small humanity really is." And Jess was right. Numbers didn't matter here. Money didn't count, and all the words and glances, the quick exchanges that built or tore down reputations had no meaning in this place. The air was moist. Fallen leaves, spreading branches, and crisscrossing roots wicked water, so that the trees seemed to drink the misty air. Jess said, "All your worries fade away, because..." Emily finished her thought. "The trees put everything in perspective.

Is it not late? A late time to be living? Are not our generations the crucial ones? For we have changed the world. Are not our heightened times the important ones? For we have nuclear bombs. Are we not especially significant because our century is? - our century and its unique Holocaust, its refugee populations, its serial totalitarian exterminations; our century and its antibiotics, silicon chips, men on the moon, and spliced genes? No, we are not and it is not. These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it?... Take away the bomb threat and what are we? Ordinary beads on a never-ending string. Our time is a routine twist of an improbable yarn...There must be something heroic about our time, something that lifts it above all those other times. Plague? Funny weather? Dire things are happening... Why are we watching the news, reading the news, keeping up with the news? Only to enforce our fancy - probably a necessary lie - that these are crucial times, and we are in on them. Newly revealed, and we are in the know: crazy people, bunches of them. New diseases, shifts in power, floods! Can the news from dynastic Egypt have been any different?

I say this to myself alone: when you feel crushed, those around you look broken. When you glow, darkness turns to black light. If you hurt, even the comforts you are offered wound you. As you prosper, your failures prove to be just the right thing, perfect.

I remember things like dates down to minutes, what they smelled like, how they walked and how they tug their hands in their pockets. I twine myself in nostalgia of moments and not necessarily the people in them. I long for the idea of the past and occasionally forget the present. I find myself lost in memories, just looking to recreate the moment; forgetting the past is in the past and what we have is now.

I see a lot of people complaining about the things they can fix, and a lot of people being accepting of the things they cannot change. Maybe tragedy really is the catastrophic event, for the way people view their lives. I would rather be wise, than nieve.

Is it logical that two people can disagree and both can be right? It's not logical: it's psychological. And it's very real. You see the young lady; I see the old woman. We're both looking at the same picture, and both of us are right. We see the same black lines, the same white spaces. But we interpret them differently because we've been conditioned to interpret them differently. And unless we value the differences in our perceptions, unless we value each other and give credence to the possibility that we're both right. . .we will never be able to transcend the limits of that conditioning. . .I value you. I value your perception. I want to understand.

Is someone different at age 18 or 60? I believe one stays the same.

I start to think, 'It's awful being too poor to even buy my own dress for homecoming.' But that's instantly swept away by another thought: 'I'm so lucky that someone cates enough to loan me a dress.

… I studied the painting that hangs over the small fireplace. Immerse myself in art, I told myself. Immerse myself in the conversation of those strollers, people who seem to move about more comfortably in their early-evening twilight than I do, people of maybe sixty years ago.

Isn't it lucky?

Is your life story the truth? Yes, the chronological events are true. Is it the whole truth? No, you see and judge it through your conditioned eyes and mind - not of all involved - nor do you see the entire overview. Is it nothing but the truth? No, you select, share, delete, distort, subtract, assume and add what you want, need and choose to.

It appears, from all this, that our eyes are uncertain. Two persons look at the same clock and there is a difference of two or three minutes in their reading of the time. One has a tendency to put back the hands, the other to advance them. Let us not too confidently try to play the part of the third person who wishes to set the first two aright; it may well happen that we are mistaken in turn. Besides, in our daily life, we have less need of certainty than of a certain approximation to certainty. Let us learn how to see, but without looking too closely at things and men: they look better from a distance.

It all depends on how we look at things, and not on how they are themselves

... I think I intuitively suspected that perspective would put me outside the painting. I didn't want that. I wanted to get close to those tables and chairs, to jump in and feel myself dancing with them, even as I sat drawing them. I didn't want things to lie down; I wanted them to come forward, to beckon and call, to be noticed on the paper as I was noticing them in real life. I wanted the viewer to have a direct connection with the objects, to feel as happy as I was in their presence.

It doesn't follow that the riots mean permanent hostility toward him.

I tell you I can't be bothered with things like that. I've got a soul above buttons.

I think that perhaps everyone has a moment that splits their life in two. When you look back on your own time line there's a sharp spike somewhere along the way, some event that changed you, changed your life more than the others. A moment that creates a before and an after. Maybe it's when you meet your love or you figure out your life's passion or you have your first child. Maybe it's something wonderful. Maybe it's something tragic. But when it happens it tints your memories, shifts your perspective on your own life and it suddenly seems as if everyone you've been through falls under the label of pre or post.

I thought it peculiar how one new experience can alter your perspective on places you've known your whole life.

I thought about the guy in the truck, the focus in his expression, and I felt like I already knew enough of the story to tell it to somebody else maybe better than either of its major players could.

I thought I was rich because I had just one flower, and all I own is an ordinary roads. That and my three volcanoes, which come up to my knee, one of which may be permanently extinct. It doesn't make me much of a Prince. . . And he lay down in the grass and wept.

It is always dangerous to declare a turning point in history. We always tend to feel that, when we are alive, something really major is happening.

It is important for me to focus on positive actions taken to heal instead of beating myself up over what I did wrong each day. It shifts my perspective, thus making my body and mind more hospitable places for healing and positive energy.

It is hard to tell from photographs if the sun is rising or the earth is still.

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.

It is innate temperament, acting on a view of the facts necessarily incomplete, that has inspired so many different teachers.

It is nearly impossible to feel anything negative in here. Because you’re really connected, to everything, here… but it’s only meant to be a temporary sanctuary, a place to remember yourself. In time you’ll want your negative thoughts, your emotional baggage back, and you’ll have hopefully bolstered yourself enough with the Sanctum’s reminder of your Source that you can come out with fresh perspective. When you’ve had enough of it, you’ll know, and then come and join us outside.