Perspective Quotes

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.

The past was always there, lived inside of you, and it helped to make you who you were. But it had to be placed in perspective. The past could not dominate the future.

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.

In the midst of difficulty lies opportunity.

Do not assume that he who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to find these words.

The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.

To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail.

I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness because it shows me the stars.

What people in the world think of you is really none of your business.

The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.

If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.

A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.

Sometimes all it takes is a tiny shift of perspective to see something familiar in a totally new light.

When you choose your friends, don't be short-changed by choosing personality over character.

It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.

My alphabet starts with this letter called yuzz. It s the letter I use to spell yuzz a ma tuzz. You ll be sort of surprised what there is to be found once you go beyond Z and start poking around

Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called everybody, and they meet at the bar.

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.

The more tranquil a man becomes, the greater is his success, his influence, his power for good. Calmness of mind is one of the beautiful jewels of wisdom.

Real love is always chaotic. You lose control; you lose perspective. You lose the ability to protect yourself. The greater the love, the greater the chaos. It's a given and that's the secret.

If you think you're free, there's no escape possible.

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.

We are all mortal until the first kiss and the second glass of wine.

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked"”as I am surprisingly often"”why I bother to get up in the mornings.

To achieve the impossible; it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.

In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

When all think alike, then no one is thinking

There is no truth. There is only perception.

Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all the others were making ships.

You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.

Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it 'creative observation.' Creative viewing.

If you focus on results, you will never change. If you focus on change, you will get results.

Life is a train of moods like a string of beads; and as we pass through them they prove to be many colored lenses, which paint the world their own hue, and each shows us only what lies in its own focus.

It is better for you to be free of fear lying upon a pallet, than to have a golden couch and a rich table and be full of trouble.

When you wake up every day, you have two choices. You can either be positive or negative; an optimist or a pessimist. I choose to be an optimist. It's all a matter of perspective.

One way to keep momentum going is to have constantly greater goals.

The true test of character is not how much we know how to do, but how we behave when we don't know what to do.

"ﾂ撮e careful not to keep your eyes glued to detail. Stand far enough away to get a perspective of the whole.

Sometimes a change of perspective is all it takes to see the light.

Faith gives you an inner strength and a sense of balance and perspective in life.

Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.

What we see depends mainly on what we look for.

Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.

As applied to substance abuse, the cognitive approach helps individuals to come to grips with the problems leading to emotional distress and to gain a broader perspective on their reliance on drugs for pleasure and/or relief from discomfort.

Sometimes you have to let go to see if there was anything worth holding onto.

Perspective is the cure for depression.

The more you lose yourself in something bigger than yourself, the more energy you will have.

The prospect of going home is very appealing.

Habit and routine have an unbelievable power to waste and destroy.

The brighter you are, the more you have to learn.

On a day of burial there is no perspective—for space itself is annihilated. Your dead friend is still a fragmentary being. The day you bury him is a day of chores and crowds, of hands false or true to be shaken, of the immediate cares of mourning. The dead friend will not really die until tomorrow, when silence is round you again. Then he will show himself complete, as he was—to tear himself away, as he was, from the substantial you. Only then will you cry out because of him who is leaving and whom you cannot detain.

Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye.

Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting.

People generally treat me like I'm very intelligent and really, I'm much less intelligent than she is. Scully is insanely intelligent.

Here is the secret of inspiration: Tell yourself that thousands and tens of thousands of people, not very intelligent and certainly no more intelligent than the rest of us, have mastered problems as difficult as those that now baffle you.

I would like travelers, especially American travelers, to travel in a way that broadens their perspective, because I think Americans tend to be some of the most ethnocentric people on the planet. It's not just Americans, it's the big countries. It's the biggest countries that tend to be ethnocentric or ugly. There are ugly Russians, ugly Germans, ugly Japanese and ugly Americans. You don't find ugly Belgians or ugly Bulgarians, they're just too small to think the world is their norm.

Shyness is just egoism out of its depth.

An event may be small and insignificant in its origin , and yet, when drawn close to one’s eye, it may open in its center an infinite and radiant perspective because a higher order of being is trying to express itself in it and irradiates it violently.

Look at life through the windshield, not the rear-view mirror

Learning to stop sweating the small stuff involves deciding what things to engage in and what things to ignore. From a certain perspective, life can be described as a series of mistakes, one right after another with a little space in between.

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.

The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one

When you are born without the ordinary feelings and emotions shared by most other human beings, life looks different to you. It seems at times like a movie you’re walking through, more a spectator than a participant. There is above all a lack of empathy with most of mankind, a sense of detachment. But with detachment comes perspective. The less you care, the more you know, and the more you know the less you care.

Serenity is knowing that your worst shot is still pretty good.

Modeling is a tough job, your co-workers are your rivals, it really puts a damper on your perspective of other girls.

It's good to shut up sometimes.

I am a big believer that you have to nourish any relationship. I am still very much a part of my friends' lives and they are very much a part of my life. A First Lady who does not have this source of strength and comfort can lose perspective and become isolated.

Man is so muddled, so dependent on the things immediately before his eyes, that every day even the most submissive believer can be seen to risk the torments of the afterlife for the smallest pleasure.

If you surrender completely to the moments as they pass, you live more richly those moments.

Inside yourself or outside, you never have to change what you see, only the way you see it.

If there is anything good about exile, it is that it teaches one humility. It accelerates one's drift into isolation, an absolute perspective. Into the condition at which all one is left with is oneself and one's language, with nobody or nothing in between. Exile brings you overnight where it would normally take a lifetime to go.

As we look for humor, seek for the eternal perspective, understnd the principle of compensation, and draw near to our Heavenly Father, we can endure heardship and trial.

When you're in the muck you can only see muck. If you somehow manage to float above it, you still see the muck but you see it from a different perspective. And you see other things too. That's the consolation of philosophy.

Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs.

There is more sophistication and less sense in New York than anywhere else on the globe.

Travel is rich with learning opportunities, and the ultimate sourvenir is a broader perspective.

Every year of my life I grow more convinced that it is wisest and best to fix our attention on the beautiful and the good, and dwell as little as possible on the evil and the false.

To know is not too demanding: it merely requires memory and time. But to understand is quite a different matter: it requires intellectual ability and training, a self conscious awareness of what one is doing, experience in techniques of analysis and synthesis, and above all, perspective.

I am truly horrified by modern man. Such absence of feeling, such narrowness of outlook, such lack of passion and information, such feebleness of thought.

What is important in life is life, and not the result of life.

You have to block everything out and be extremely focused and be relaxed and mellow too.

A weak mind is like a microscope, which magnifies trifling things, but cannot receive great ones.

Modernism may be seen as an attempt to reconstruct the world in the absence of God.

No endeavor that is worthwhile is simple in prospect; if it is right, it will be simple in retrospect.

I would advocate that chocolate be covered by health insurance, but that is admittedly a very French public policy perspective.

Every day of my life, I feel fat. It's not correct thinking in the natural, normal human being's way of life.

Ideally, travel broadens our perspectives personally, culturally, and politically. Suddenly, the palette with which we paint the story of our lives has more colors.

Etiquette means behaving yourself a little better than is absolutely essential.

People have the illusion that all over the world, all the time, all kinds of fantastic things are happening. When in fact, over most of the world, most of the time, nothing is happening.

A 'modern' man has nothing to add to modernism, if only because he has nothing to oppose it with. The well-adapted drop off the dead limb of time like lice.

Energetic action on debt would make a radical difference to the prospects of many of the poorest countries in the world, at no practical cost to creditor countries.

You hear about constitutional rights, free speech and the free press. Every time I hear these words I say to myself, 'That man is a Red, that man is a Communist!' You never hear a real American talk like that.

If you nurture your mind, body, and spirit, your time will expand. You will gain a new perspective that will allow you to accomplish much more.