Perspective Quotes

All the anxiety over small things had burned off me in the fire of reentry, the fire of being afraid I was going to die.

~ Jennifer Hayden

A popular Harvard business professor urged his students to read the obituaries in the New York Times before they read anything else, in order to learn from the lives of great men.

~ Georges F. Doriot

Don't be such a crybaby. The fucking world ended. Everyone's mother is dead, you pussy. Besides... we're on our way to talk to the people who cut you mom's head off... have some motherfucking perspective.

~ Robert Kirkman

The Lord works in mysterious ways. What's true to one man, a wonder and a marvel, might not seem so to another, as God didn't intend it for him.

~ Katherine Howe

Nothing new about death, nothing new about deaths caused militarily. We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo on that night of March 9-10 than went up in vapor at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

~ Ronald Schaffer

The needs of a society determine its ethics, and in the Black American ghettos the hero is that man who is offered only the crumbs from his country's table but by ingenuity and courage is able to take for himself a Lucullan feast. Hence the janitor who lives in one room but sports a robin's-egg-blue Cadillac is not laughed at but admired, and the domestic who buys forty-dollar shoes is not criticized but is appreciated. We know that they have put to use their full mental and physical powers. Each single gain feeds into the gains of the body collective.

~ Maya Angelou

If you aren't outraged, then you just aren't paying attention

~ Lisa Borden

Becoming a lake has put a lot of things in perspective for me.

~ Heather Christle

It looks a lot better from up here than it does down there, dont it? Yes. It does. There's a lot of things look better at a distance. Yeah? I think so. I guess there are. The life you've lived, for one. Yeah. Maybe what of it you aint lived yet, too.

~ Cormac Mccarthy

The forest stretched on seemingly forever with the most monotonous predictability, each tree just like the next - trunk, branches, leaves; trunk, branches, leaves. Of course a tree would have taken a different view of the matter. We all tend to see the way others are alike and how we differ, and it's probably just as well we do, since that prevents a great deal of confusion. But perhaps we should remind ourselves from time to time that ours is a very partial view, and that the world is full of a great deal more variety than we ever manage to take in.

~ Thomas M. Disch

Comedy is tragedy standing on its head with its pants down.

~ Chris Crutcher

But of course these conjectures as to why God does what He does are probably of no more value than my dog's ideas of what I am up to when I sit and read.

~ C.s. Lewis

We spread our sleeping bags on the snow and crawled inside. The vantage point was dizzying. It was impossible to tell whether the comet was above us or we were above the comet; we were all falling through space, missing the stars by inches.

~ Anne Fadiman

The circularity of influence was like a trail of dominoes falling in four dimensions. Each time one slapped another and fell to the ground, from a different vantage point it appeared knocked upright, ready to be slapped and fall again. Everything was not merely relative, it was--how to put it? --relevant. Representational. Revealing. Referential and reverential both.

~ Gregory Maguire

I now saw, with great dismay, that what I had been carrying all this time was not a bowl but a book. This ruined everything.

~ C.s. Lewis

The man who'll lay the last stone here isn't even born yet.

~ André Aciman

We see only a part of the surface of things. The rest will be forever hidden from us, to be appreciated for its felt but unfathomed presence.

~ Richard Taylor

But twice-two-makes-four is for all that a most insupportable thing. Twice-two-makes-four is, in my humble opinion, nothing but a piece of impudence. Twice-two-makes-four is a farcical, dressed-up fellow who stands across your path with arms akimbo and spits at you.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

However, do you know what? I am convinced that fellows like me who live in dark cellars must be kept under restraint. They may be able to live in their dark cellars for forty years and never open their mouths, but the moment they get into the light of day and break out they may talk and talk and talk...

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Western church needs to regain its confidence in the role of outsiders, relocators who come in humility and grace to learn first and then to offer a different perspective.

~ Craig Greenfield

He had refused fancy clothes or makeup for this interview. His philosophy was that death should to be embarrassing, he was not about to powder its nose.

~ Mitch Albom

You're Superman, thinking Kryptonite makes you invincible. 

~ J.m. Darhower

Romanticizing comes with colored glasses of the most colored sort.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

They ask me, what will change if we change the perspective?I replied, “Everything.

~ Nikhil Shrivastava

Then the nurse did turn to glance, and then stare—actually stare—at me. His look made me feel as if I was green, or whistling, or dead.

~ Rivka Galchen

My temperament and my instinct had told me alike that the author, who writes at his own emergency, remains and needs to remain at his private remove. I wished to be, not effaced, but invisible - actually a profound position. Perspective, the line of vision, the frame of vision - these set a distance.

~ Eudora Welty

Just because you don't like something doesn't mean it's bad.

~ Scott Stabile

Why is it only now that I can see how many ordinary things are actually grotesque?

~ Sara Baume

There is a sky full of stars aplenty, and all you can babble about is a cold, little rock we call the moon. This is how it is with petty problems that exist too close to us.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Look at the lonely fisherman,' my father says.'Look at his view,' my mother says.

~ Hannah Lillith Assadi

Life is neither a glorious highlight reel nor a monstrous tragedy. Every day is a good day to live and a good day to die. Every day is also an apt time to learn and express joy and love for the entire natural world. Each day is an apt time to make contact with other people and express empathy for the entire world. Each day is perfect to accept with indifference all aspects of being.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

That it may be the only thing the darkness makes clearer: who really matters is whoever you're most desperate to see.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

Life is beautiful, but it is also so damn ugly.

~ Mommy Moo Moo

You understand, we just don't fuck with truth.

~ Charles Bukowski

It was one of those perfect nights, listening to the waves crash, feeling the warm summer breeze, watching the sun set over the ocean as the moon rose up in the sky. I looked out over the cliffs and I thought about the explorers who had sailed from places like this, what they'd accomplished, mapping the unknown world, charting our place in the universe. How many times had they failed and fallen down only to get back up and try again? How many times had they sailed out on an impossible voyage and made a successful return home? I sat there with Carola looking out over the endless horizon. It was strange, but I felt like everything was going to be okay. The end of my story was not yet written, and I still had the chance to make it extraordinary.

~ Mike Massimino

Behavior makes sense from the actor's perception or else the actor wouldn't do it. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, you know, today I'm going to be conforming, mistaken, nasty, and so on.

~ Ellen J. Langer

Loved for is based on one's perception, you can easily spend a lifetime trying to define its definition.

~ Tyconis D. Allison Ty

Now he wondered what use it would be. For Kaspar’s death would not bring back his father, Elk’s Call at Dawn, or his mother, Whisper of the Night Wind. His brother, Hand of the Sun, and his little sister Miliana would remain dead. The only time he would hear the voice of his grandfather, Laughter in His Eyes, would be in his memory. Nothing would change. No farmer outside Krondor would suddenly stand up in wonder and say, “A wrong has been righted.” No boot-maker in Roldem would look up from his bench and say, “A people has been avenged.

~ Raymond E. Feist

He knew there was only a slight difference between an armed guard and an escort, but sometimes that difference separated the honored and the condemned.

~ Raymond E. Feist

My father used to say, “a day spent breathing is a good day

~ Raymond E. Feist