Perspective Quotes

“Every broken heart has one time or another asked, "What is important to me now?”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Inventions are not solely the making of material things, inventions are also the mental unleashing of ideas by a genuis with a sixth sense.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“I liked to put young and old in the same room, because they would certainly have different takes on the same problem.”
― Antonio Mendez, Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History

“When one has little faith, one must survive from day to day signs-”
― Stephen King, Bag of Bones

“From the landscape: a sense of scale. From the dead: a sense of scale.”
― Richard Siken

“...otherwise, one of you, most likely the man, would go wandering off on a trajectory of his own, taking his addictive body with him and leaving you with bad withdrawal, which you could counteract by exercise. If you didn't work it out it was because one of you had the wrong attitude. Everything that went on in your life was thought to be due to some positive or negative power emanating from inside your head.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“That's one of the compensations for being mediocre. One doesn't have to worry about becoming mediocre.”
― Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem

“Like it! Yes—the way I'd like a hot stove if I was to set on it long enough. No, Tom, I won't be rich, and I won't live in them cussed smothery houses. I like the woods, and the river, and hogsheads, and I'll stick to 'em, too.”
― Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

“The definition of stupid is the inabilitly to see another side to an argument other than one's own.”
― James Rozoff

“De leur meilleur côté tâchons de voir les choses:
Vous vous plaignez de voir les rosiers épineux;
Moi je me réjouis et rends grâces aux dieux
Que les épines aient des roses.”
― Alphonse Karr, A Tour Round My Garden

“No two people ever view the world from exactly the same perspective, understand things the same way, human or not. The best we can ever do is try.”
― Debra Driza, MILA 2.0

“People have the power to change their perspective. They just get caught up in an endless cycle of foolish things that don’t matter.”
― Jamie Magee, Insight

“History does not usually make real sense until long afterward.”
― Bruce Catton

“Oceans recede and coastlines wither and crack. Nations lapse; others soon swagger in their places. Mountains crumble to dust, rains vanish into the sea, winds return whence they came, and every city men build has but a jumble of bones for its foundation. What is your need to me? I am the Watcher in the Dark.”
― J. Aleksandr Wootton, The Eighth Square

“One of the powerful functions of a library — any library — lies in its ability to take us away from worlds that are familiar and comfortable and into ones which we can neither predict nor control, to lead us down new roads whose contours and vistas provide us with new perspectives. Sometimes, if we are fortunate, those other worlds turn out to have more points of familiarity with our own than we had thought. Sometimes we make connections back to familiar territory and when we have returned, we do so supplied with new perspectives, which enrich our lives as scholars and enhance our role as teachers. Sometimes the experience takes us beyond our immediate lives as scholars and teachers, and the library produces this result particularly when it functions as the storehouse of memory, a treasury whose texts connect us through time to all humanity."

[Browsing in the Western Stacks, Harvard Library Bulletin NS 6(3): 27-33, 1995]”
― Richard F. Thomas

“When you’re here, an i in the Ocean, you’re no longer waiting for something to happen or to change. When you’re here you have what you seek. Your heart opens to the gift you receive, that you are.”
― Jean-Pierre Weill, The Well of Being

“I had treated my temporary earthly problems so emotionally and seriously that they became major energy zappers, brain drains, and heart breakers. I knew I was a Christian living in this world, but things didn’t really sink in until the concept of the purple wedge made me ‘see’ it and put things into perspective.”
― Van Harden, Life in the Purple Wedge!

“I start to think, 'It's awful being too poor to even buy my own dress for homecoming.' But that's instantly swept away by another thought: 'I'm so lucky that someone cates enough to loan me a dress.”
― Margaret Peterson Haddix, Full Ride

“I am most right because I realize I am most wrong”
― Markus R

“Those who truly want greatness must surround themselves with people even greater than they are.”
― Dan Pearce, Single Dad Laughing: The Best of Year One

“You are the conductor of your own attitude! Nobody else can compose your thoughts for you.”
― Lee J. Colan

“Worry is a weighty monster with poisoned tentacles. It clutches at us, grabs at our minds, steals our breath, our will. It lurks. It pounces. It colors how we perceive the world.”
― Mary E. DeMuth, Everything: What You Give and What You Gain to Become Like Jesus

“-I don't know that thin and pretty is what Nat is supposed to be, though. Does that make any sense?"
If she'd been holding on to any illusions about how much she liked Vince Grasso-not lusted for him, which she also did-that last speech would have cinched it. "It makes perfect sense. She's beautiful in her own way, but pretty is something...else. And I've had friends who were really pretty-it didn't always help them all that much.'
"Yeah," he said. "My wife was pretty, and she was miserable her whole life. I just want my girls to be happy. Be themselves, you know, whatever it is.”
― Barbara O'Neal, The Secret of Everything

“Sometimes she wondered if the shape of his eyes affected how he saw things. That was probably the most racist question of all time.”
― Rainbow Rowell Eleanor and Park

“I suppose history always did have in it a large bit of the perspective of those who wrote it. People tend to make their own truth of what was right loom larger than other truths just as true but somehow less favorable to telling.”
― Na'ama Yehuda, Outlawed Hope

“Get some perspective. A lot of things that may aggravate you only do so because you have the luxury of not wrestling with bigger issues. Today, be thankful for everything you have: being alive, your friends and family, your health, a roof over your head, something to eat, clean water to drink, indoor plumbing, heating, air conditioning, clothes, shoes, a job, and freedoms. Many, many people have it worse.”
― Dinah Sanders, Discardia: More Life, Less Stuff

“Sometimes life holds more than people allow themselves to see. Such individuals may continue to live as though they are blind for eternities before realizing they were merely clamping their eyes shut.”
― Emily Herr

“Can we ever see the truth when desire blinds us? Or do we call it the truth because it is what we wish to see?”
― Kate Elliott, Cold Steel

“Personally, I’m choosing to dwell upon the glory of the kingdom of which I am a part, even though I’m still a witness and sometimes a victim of the junk in ‘this’ world.”
― Van Harden, Life in the Purple Wedge!

“The nature of God's plan can be difficult to fathom when you are toiling in some small corner of it, but it is glorious from above, if you allow yourself the perspective.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Find What You Love and Let It Kill You