Perspective Quotes

The same view you look at every day, the same life, can become something brand new by focusing on its gifts rather than the negative aspects. Perspective is your own choice and the best way to shift that perspective is through gratitude, by acknowledging and appreciating the positives.

~ Bronnie Ware

If you dwell on the negatives, any life can be terrible, regardless of its circumstances.

~ Avina Celeste

All too often we fail to see the good in a difficult situation. Our minds are wired in such a funny way that we tend to believe just because a door closed it must be a bad thing.

~ Lindsey Rietzsch

The author, then in the final stage as a candidate for Delta Force, was asked by the unit's foreboding colonel what he thought of the evaluation's Stress Week. He responded that he was waiting for it to begin, reasoning that, used to responsibility for others while leading a platoon, he only had himself to worry about. However hard the trial, he got four meals a day, nobody shot at, him, and the weather was pleasant.

~ Eric Haney

Although not a very old man, I have yet lived a great deal in my life, and I have known sorrow too bitter and joy too keen to allow me to become either cast down or elated for more than a very brief period over any success or defeat.

~ Theodore Roosevelt

We have a choice. We can be jaded by what we’ve lost, or joyous over what that thing had accomplished while we had it.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

The foremost calling of the human brain is to script a safe, secure, and joyous future for a person.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Joy cannot be confused with the mere absence sorrow, misinterpreted as experiencing minimal despair, or misunderstood as living without crippling trepidation. Bliss necessarily encompasses uncompromising acceptance of life’s defining permutations. Emotional harmony necessitates beholding the pleasant and unpleasant exigencies of life while expressing unstinting appreciation for the ordinary and the extraordinary events in our lives. Joyfulness transcends the variations in physical and emotional demands exerted upon us. Elation for life allows us to rise above environmental determinates and associated stresses that might otherwise vex our souls including death and other sorrowful events.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

It is not a person or situation that affects your life; it is the meaning you give to that person or situation, which influences your emotions and actions. Your choice is to change the meaning you gave it or to change your response, in order to create the outcome you want.

~ Shannon L. Alder

No one is ever a victim of life, we are all volunteering to grow.

~ Shannon L. Alder

When I look over my past, I see that the stages in my life are like the phases of the moon. I've had periods where I was the waxing gibbous: fat with wealth and success. There have been other seasons when my happiness was like the waning crescent and I watched my joy fade away slowly, merging with the atmosphere around me as if it never existed. Then I felt as if I was left with nothing more than an illusion, but happiness returns in time and glows once more in corpulent fullness. It's time that makes the difference.

~ Amy Neftzger

We gain new perspectives on life after every voyage.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I've learned far too much to know everything.

~ J.s.b. Morse

Perspective and perseverance are carved by time and constructed by wisdom.

~ A.d. Sams

The perception of other people and the intersubjective world is problematic only for adults. The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him. He has no awares of himself or of others as private subjectives, nor does he suspect that all of us, himself included, are limited to one certain point of view of the world. That is why he subjects neither his thoughts, in which he believes as they present themselves, to any sort of criticism. He has no knowledge of points of view. For him men are empty heads turned towards one single, self-evident world where everything takes place, even dreams, which are, he thinks, in his room, and even thinking, since it is not distinct from words.

~ Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Logically, I understand that it wasn't Edward's fault my family fell apart after he left. But when you're eleven years old, you don't give a flip about logic. You just really miss holding your big brother's hand.

~ Jodi Picoult

I know it’s hard when other children are called home but we can find purpose and good in all things when we can see things from the Lord’s perspective. There is goodness to be found and lives are still touched and changed for the good when little ones go home to Heavenly Father. My sister was 7 when she returned to him. Her passing gave me the strength to be who I am today. Every experience we have had in our lives has made us the strong women we are today.The Lord is strengthening those families as they pass through these trials just as He does us.

~ Laura Lane

I truly believe that the children who are diagnosed with cancer are some of the wisest, sweetest, strongest, and most loving children. They have gained a bigger perspective of the world in such a short time. They become wise beyond their years.

~ Laura Lane

And the sun on the wall of her room, the block of sun with all the tiny flying things in it. When she was little she thought they were the souls of dead insects, still buzzing in the light.

~ Tim Winton

She was still glad she looked like Scully. He wasn't pretty either, but pretty people weren't the kind you need. Pretty people saw themselves in the mirror and were either too happy or too sad. People like Billie just shrugged and didn't care. She didn't want to turn into anyone pretty. Anyway, she had scars now, you only had to look.

~ Tim Winton

A mother is a child's first looking glass into the world.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Edmund doesn’t solve any of his grievances or personality disorders by going through the wardrobe. If anything, they're exacerbated and brought to a crisis by his experiences in Narnia. When you go to Narnia, your worries come with you. Narnia just becomes the place where you work them out and try to resolve them.

~ Levi Grossman

Without even trying to be a teacher, Fredrika is teaching us,Showing us how to see things in new waysInstead of always thinkingThe same old thoughtsThat have been passed along by strangersDay after day, year after yearWithout any spirit of amazementOr wonder

~ Margarita Engle

Our society tends to regard as a sickness any mode of thought or behavior that is inconvenient for the system and this is plausible because when an individual doesn't fit into the system it causes pain to the individual as well as problems for the system. Thus the manipulation of an individual to adjust him to the system is seen as a cure for a sickness and therefore as good.

~ Theodore J. Kaczynski

[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.

~ Susan Sontag

The death of a lesser man is the death of all those who believe themselves to be greater.

~ Shaun Hick

Nobody's innocent... but that doesn't reset the bar on guilt.

~ Bryan Way

The pursuit of happiness seems worthwhile only because of the chase. You love it only if you don’t realize you’re never going to catch up.

~ Bryan Way

The importance of humor is primarily to puncture fixed ideas—to make us step back and realize that our situation, whatever it may be, is, in the grand scheme of things, always contingent and arbitrary and ephemeral. And that helps us to deal with our emotions and to keep going. Holding on to one perspective, on the other hand, whether it takes the form of grief or anger or a particular political standpoint, is often destructive to us and to those around us

~ Paul Murray

When good people consider you the bad guy, you develop a heart to help the bad ones. You actually understand them.

~ Criss Jami

Aronson's first law:People who do crazy things are not necessarily crazy.

~ Elliot Aronson

We all feel that the opposite of our own highest principle must be purely destructive, deadly, and evil. We refuse to endow it with any positive life-force; hence we avoid and fear it.

~ C.g. Jung

So I was just thinking about how something happened today and it was quite insightful, humbling and puts things into perspective. If you look at anything, everything has it's 'story' so to speak. For instance, for me to even write this status requires an obscene amount of processes (essentially limitless). Just the biological processes that have to take place are in the trillions. Then you add the technological component, the psychology behind it(self-awareness/consciousness). Then you start looking at the macro factors behind it which include how I came into existence, how life came to be for that to occur, how earth came to be, the sun, the solar system, the galaxy, universe...etc. So the odds for all those things to occur for me to write a simple (or not so simply) status like this....is pretty fucking incredible to say the least.

~ Michael R. Kitay

Changing yourself changes everything.

~ Bryant Mcgill

The crazy creatives are the creatives who never go completely mad. They aren't so easily disheartened by the seemingly endless amounts of scrutiny that creative individuals tend to receive because they, like insanity, are the ones who feed off of opposition and negative feedback and manage to continue along with a healthy ambition. It is the crazy that teaches us to use our gifts wisely and own all the attackers.

~ Criss Jami

You had a choice: you could either strain and look at things that appeared in front of you in the fog, painful as it might be, or you could relax and lose yourself

~ Ken Kesey

The same way we grow our bodies we must attend to our mind and spirit.

~ Nikki Rowe

Your strength doesn't come from winning. It comes from struggles and hardship. Everything that you go through prepares you for the next level.

~ Germany Kent

Sometimes troubles make us stronger. We put things in perspective and find priorities.

~ Gail Gaymer Martin

I lost all I had known and gained a life I was yet to know.

~ Nikki Rowe