Perspective Quotes

But the biggest clue seemed to be their expressions. They were hard to explain. Good-natured, friendly, easygoing...and uninvolved. They were like spectators. You had the feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. There was no identification with the job. No saying, I am a mechanic. At 5 P.M. or whenever their eight hours were in, you knew they would cut it off and not have another thought about their work. They were already trying not to have any thoughts about their work on the job.

~ Robert M. Pirsig

Are we not all actors playing parts in another person's play?

~ Shannon L. Alder

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

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

A conscious act grew out of this by the time I began writing stories: getting my distance, a prerequisite of my understanding of human events, is the way I begin work. Just as, of course, it was an initial step when, in my first journalism job, I stumbled into making pictures with a camera. Frame, proportion, perspective, the values of light and shade; all are determined by the distance of the observing eye.

~ Eudora Welty

If one just intellectually understands the view it will not help! One must actually experience it! There are many people who understand the view but don’t experience it. If the view were experienced, they wouldn’t act the way they do!

~ Padampa Sangye

The more power you use--the more detailed the observation of your specimen.The more power you have, the narrower your field of vision.Exactly, you say. The more power you have, my friends, the less you see of the whole.

~ Rosemary Nixon

The problem with our culture is we cling to so many different truths. Yet, the truths that we cling to also depend on our point of view. Maybe, the journey to a truth that can be free of hatred, bias and injustice requires a journey of the soul to see all view points.

~ Shannon L. Alder

We are not judges for ourselves until circumstances call us to act.

~ Abigail Adams

A distaste for the new is not always fear of the unknown, but sometimes ambition. Some people don't like the new way simply because they never got a chance to master the old way.

~ Criss Jami

Try to get inside the world of Homer and see what it would be like to think with his view of reality. Only then can you begin to judge it, because only then do you really understand it.

~ John Mark Reynolds

Sometimes the closer we got to a situation, the less clear it looked.

~ Wally Lamb

There is the truth , the perception of truth, and versions that don't even come close; but it's the perception that creates the most conflict every time.

~ Johnnie Dent Jr.

Sometimes an outside perspective is the clearer perspective.

~ Shannon A. Thompson

He had allowed the advertisers to multiply his wants; he had learned to equate happiness with possessions, and prosperity with money to spend in a shop.

~ Aldous Huxley

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.

~ Sharon E. Rainey

It's only when you put action into practice will you ever really unlock the real possibilities that surround you.

~ Tony Curl

Synchronicity occurs at the intersection of your awareness, response, perspective, and action.

~ Andrea Goeglein

Anything you dream [can] be yours simply because you've focused on the steps you could take instead of the distance to get there.

~ A.j. Darkholme

I scared a little porcupineand caught a quill in my behind.It hurt so badly in my tail,but tugging on it made me yell.The porcupine was still around,so I complained. He simply frownedand said, Stop whining! Look and seehow many quills are stuck on me!

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

The most fatal illusion is the settled point of view. Since life is growth and motion, a fixed point of view kills anybody who has one.

~ Brooks Atkinson

...You don't always get what you expect. I wish someone, sometime when I was growing up, would have told me what expectations would get me. ... Our parents, schools, everyone tells us things will be a certain way when we're adults and if they're not that way, we should make them be; or at least pretend. But after a certain point that just doesn't work.

~ Chris Crutcher

I'd proven to the world that maturity, experience, dedication, and ingenuity can make up for a little senescence. Muscle tightening is not the only thing that happens to our bodies over time. We gain knowledge, focus, and understanding, and those things can help us win.

~ Dara Torres

...each of us has an explanatory style... And our explanation is more important than the experience itself. In the words of Aldous Huxley, Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.

~ Mark Batterson

Life is a repeated cycle of getting lost and then finding yourself again. There are many smaller cycles within that cycle where you get lost to a smaller degree and then remember yourself again. Sometimes you do it to yourself on purpose, consciously or unconsciously. Every time you get lost it is so that you can learn something or experience something from a different perspective.

~ Jay Woodman

Here march the eaters of earth, the swallowers of rain.

~ J. Aleksandr Wootton

I liked to put young and old in the same room, because they would certainly have different takes on the same problem.

~ Antonio J. Méndez

The desolate narrowness, the definitive thinness of experience is both the vainglory and the dead giveaway of a provincial man.

~ Pat Conroy

Language itself is so value-laden as to render value-neutrality almost impossible. Growing up in England I was introduced to the American Revolution by a 'footnote' to colonial history about the 'revolt' of the American colonies. Word choice and the organization of material gave the game away.

~ Arthur F. Holmes

You are lucky to feel sadness.

~ John O'callaghan

She was a wicked thing sometimes. All full of want. As if the shape of the world depended on her mood. As if she were important.

~ Patrick Rothfuss

Ordinary life is fascinating when viewed with extraordinary perspective.

~ Angela Howell

Do not except anything as love without truth because love and truth have always been best friends.

~ Shannon L. Alder

What separates us into engineers and robots, puppeteers and puppets, kings and pawns, is not the status we hold at any given time among others - status is irrelevant; it is the level of ever-present awareness we have of a grey-matter tailor's tools [of flattery, persuasion, and cunning.]

~ A.j. Darkholme

The sense of perspective that interaction with multiple cultures gives you I find to be extremely valuable, because it allows you to see the structure of a country with greater clarity, and gives you a sense of mental independence.

~ Julian Assange

A psychopathy on Anarres was rational behavior on Urras.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

It is myopic to base sweeping change on the narrow experience of a few years.

~ Antonin Scalia

Malignant phenomena do not come out of a golden age.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

There were always those passengers who came aboard bearing grudges against the modern age.

~ Erik Larson

By focusing on her career and taking a calculated approach to amassing power, Heidi violated our stereotypical expectations of women. Yet by behaving in the same manner, Howard lived up to our stereotypical expectations of men. The end result? Liked him, disliked her.

~ Sheryl Sandberg

Just as we seldom realize that we are growing old until we are already old, so do the contemporary actors in a major social change seldom realize that society is changing until the change has already come.

~ James Burnham