Perspective Quotes

How Horrid has a slightly facetious tone that strikes me as Wildean. It appears to embrace the actual horror--puberty, public disgrace--then at the last second nimbly sidesteps it, laughing.

~ Alison Bechdel

Sometimes there is a microcosm and a macrocosm, and if you're dyslexic like me you can't tell the difference.

~ Bruce Bickford

Everyone’s perception is different, we all see different things. I personally think you see what you want to see.

~ Fisher Amelie

I’m supposed to figure out if the glass is half full or half empty,” I told her.Without a moment’s hesitation, in a split second, my grandmother shrugged and said: “It depends on if you’re drinking or pouring.

~ Bill Cosby

Once the blinders are off, it's rather hard to go back to seeing things the way you used to.

~ Mercedes Lackey

If there’s one thing I have learned it’s that if you carry on as though nothing strange is happening, it usually stops being strange

~ Sarah-Kate Lynch

Each of us sees things not as they are but as we are.

~ Jack Provonsha

Being put in our place by something larger, older, greater than ourselves is not a humiliation; it should be accepted as a relief from our insanely hopeful ambitions for our lives.

~ Alain De Botton

I am grateful for the rare opportunities to look at my circumstances from a higher perspective, one detached from the dim outlook I normally insist on seeing. These periodic glimpses show me life's grandeur.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Wide horizons lead the soul to broad ideas; circumscribed horizons engender narrow ideas; this sometimes condemns great hearts to become small minded.Broad ideas hated by narrow ideas,—this is the very struggle of progress.

~ Victor Hugo

Nations tend to see the other side's war atrocities as systemic and indicative of their culture and their own atrocities as justified or the acts of stressed combatants. In my travels, I sense a smoldering resentment towards WWII Japanese behavior among some Americans. Ironically, these feelings are strongest among the younger American generation that did not fight in WWII. In my experience, the Pacific vets on both sides have made their peace. And in terms of judgments, I will leave it to those who were there. As Ray Gallagher, who flew on both atomic missions against Hiroshima and Nagasaki argues, When you're not at war you're a good second guesser. You had to live those years and walk that mile.

~ James D. Bradley

...consider yourself a functional character in someone else's novel - a background character - a person on the street - that's the perspective ...

~ John Geddes

He had no ideal world of dead heroes, he knew little of the life of men in the past, he must find the beings to whom he could cling with loving admiration among those who came within speech of him.

~ George Eliot

...you've lost perspective? Well, get it back - God alone has the third person point of view in this life ...

~ John Geddes

Let me be one of the upward and outward lookers, not one of the downward and inward lookers.

~ Alfred Edersheim

There is no hour that has not its births of gladness and despair, no morning brightness that does not bring new sickness to desolation as well as new forces to genius and love. There are so many of us, and our lots are so different, what wonder that Nature's mood is often in harsh contrast with the great crisis of our lives?

~ George Eliot

...what happens tomorrow is the future but what happened yesterday is already part of on-going history...

~ Peggy Herbert

The worm in the radish doesn't think there is anything sweeter.

~ Sholem Aleichem

Narratives are the primary way in which we make sense of our lives, as opposed to, for example schema,cognition, beliefs, constructs. Definition of narrative include the important element of giving meaning to events and experiences over time by connecting them as a developing, continuing story.

~ Jacqui Stedmon

To me art means power to sway people not with my words but with a mere picture. Art means expression, not my own but of the subjects. Art means truth; because when you see a picture you see all that is real. Art is exposure, showing things in a way they haven’t been seen before.

~ Cv

Author points out in Woodrow Wilson the flipside of the positive we might call big picture vision. He observes that as college president Wilson resorted to the language of a national crusade when he met resistance in a local, academic issue.

~ David Pietrusza

Sometimes one waits too long for the perfect moment before snapping the picture. You never realize that you needed was to change perspective.

~ Miguel Syjuco

So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners?

~ David Mitchell

One of the best gifts you can give to someone, is a wider perspective. It's also one of the best gifts you can receive. So if you have given someone a wider perspective, don't feel bad about it (about taking their blindfolds off and having to watch them cringe in the newfound sunlight); I know it's hard, but you're doing them a lasting favor. And a wider perspective can be difficult for you yourself to accept, in the beginning (during the time that you squint while the sunlight stings your own eyes), but later you'll find yourself coming back to it, even if you abandoned it as something worthless; you'll look for it, one day. Or it will grow on you. Perspective.

~ C. Joybell C.

It seemed the more I knew about people the more I knew about the strange magic hidden in their hearts.

~ Rudolfo Anaya

The successful person and the unsuccessful person are looking at the same world, the difference between them is what they see.

~ Steve Maraboli

Science cuts two ways, of course; its products can be used for both good and evil. But there's no turning back from science. The early warnings about technological dangers also come from science.

~ Carl Sagan

To accept the lively, the messy, and the unexpected things in our days, knowing that God sees them and has an eternal perspective, is to say with confidence I receive your timing.

~ Emily P. Freeman

And as I looked at the star, I realised what millions of other people have realised when looking at stars. We’re tiny. We don’t matter. We’re here for a second and then gone the next. We’re a sneeze in the life of the universe.

~ Danny Wallace

True inspiration unfolds itself, not by force or it becomes fake. True intuition is also the ability to be observant.

~ Chris Messner

Because that world's gone. The world where people walked around whistling that music. All the madrigal singers in the world can't make that other one real again. It's like dinosaurs. We can put them back together perfectly, bone for bone, but we don't know what they smelled like, what kind of sounds they made, or how big they really looked standing in the grass under all those fossil fern trees. Even the sunlight must have been different, and the wind. What can bones tell you about a kind of wind that doesn't blow anymore?

~ Peter S. Beagle

Maybe it's just that some of us have had certain facts and truths slapped up against our heads so hard and so often that we have to see them and pay our respects to their reality.

~ Ralph Ellison

Those two little words -- says you -- are the most powerful argument in any discipline: theology, philosphy, even domestic harmony. They are powerful because they are true. Whenever you say something, it is you who says it. You. And what do you know?

~ J. Mark Bertrand

Perspective was my secret weapon, and books gave me plenty of ammunition.

~ Ian Mcnulty

Yefgenii said, The Americans spent millions of dollars designing a pen that would work in space. What did we do? Gevorkian's head was down, his eyes were down. What did we do?Gevorkian lifted his head We used pencils.We used pencils.

~ Jed Mercurio

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.

~ Lynn Cullen

Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this, they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation from God. When the economists say the present-day relations--the relations of bourgeois production--are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature. These relations therefore are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus, there has been history, but there is no longer any. There has been history, since there were institutions of feudalism, and in these institutions of feudalism we find quite different relations of production from those of bourgeois society, which the economists try to pass off as natural and, as such, eternal.

~ Karl Marx

Water in the boat is the ruin of the boat, but water under the boat is its support.

~ Jalaluddin Rumi

You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.

~ Alan Perlis

Perspective is not a science but a hope.

~ John Berger