Perspective Quotes

“Your perspective is always limited by how much you know. Expand your knowledge and you will transform your mind.”
― Bruce H. Lipton

“You will be a beautiful person, as long as you see the beauty in others.”
― Bryant McGill

“Her own misery filled her heart—there was no room in it for other people's sorrow.”
― George Eliot, Adam Bede

“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, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

“So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners?”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“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, Grace for the Good Girl: Letting Go of the Try-Hard Life

“Just remember that those who feel profoundly depressed are those whose happiness is likewise intense. What's so wrong with that?”
― Ashly Lorenzana

“Once the blinders are off, it's rather hard to go back to seeing things the way you used to.”
― Mercedes Lackey, The Fairy Godmother

“If you love yourself the most at your happiest moments, there is no reason not to be fond of who you are in the dark.”
― Ashly Lorenzana

“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, Danny Wallace and the Centre of the Universe

“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 in Juneteenth

“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, The Folk of the Air

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

“Maybe belief is the biggest lie. In ages past, the earliest philosophers tried to explain the stars in the sky and the world around them. One of them conceived of the notion that the universe was mounted on giant crystal spheres controlled by a giant machine, which explained the movements of the heavens. He was laughed at and told that such a machine would be so huge and noisy that everyone would hear it. He simply replied that we are born with that noise all around us, and that we are so used to hearing it that we cannot hear it at all.”
― Dan Abnett

“If we were to gain God's perspective, even for a moment, and were to look at the way we go through life accumulating and hoarding and displaying our things, we would have the same feelings of horror and pity that any sane person has when he views people in an asylum endlessly beating their heads against the wall.”
― Randy Alcorn, Money, Possessions, and Eternity: A Comprehensive Guide to What the Bible Says about Financial Stewardship, Generosity, Materialism, Retirement, Financial Planning, Gambling, Debt, and More

“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, Adam Bede

“After five seconds there was a click, and the entire Universe was there in the box with him.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“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, Adam Bede

“We think of those nights spent with one or more friends, nights when we merged with the shadows and could see the world with eyes that were not our own.”
― Whipplesnaith

“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, Rethinking Worldview: Learning to Think, Live, and Speak in This World

“How you look it is pretty much how you'll see it”
― Rasheed Ogunlaru

“Perspective was my secret weapon, and books gave me plenty of ammunition.”
― Ian McNulty

“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, The Poverty of Philosophy

“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 Bradley, Flyboys

“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, The Creation of Eve

“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, 1920: The Year of the Six Presidents

“...you've lost perspective? Well, get it back - God alone has the third person point of view in this life ...”
― John Geddes, A Familiar Rain

“...consider yourself a functional character in someone else's novel - a background character - a person on the street - that's the perspective ...”
― John Geddes, A Familiar Rain

“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, Ascent

“We have to care what someone thinks of us. We are incapable of seeing ourselves [sometimes].”
― Darnell Lamont Walker