Selected perspective quotes

1. A weak mind is like a microscope, which magnifies trifling things but cannot receive great ones.

2. There, but for the grace of God, goes God.

3. To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

4. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.

5. Beauty, thou wild fantastic ape Who dost in every country change thy shape!

6. That's a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.

7. One man's constant is another man's variable.

8. Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy.

9. World-view is a product of life-view, not vice versa.

10. Providence conceals itself in the details of human affairs, but becomes unveiled in the generalities of history.

11. In the meantime, it just makes it a little harder to smile. But so does the world.

12. Taking a year off and going to school was the best thing I could have done after The Princess Diaries. It taught me that I don't need Hollywood or a job to make me happy.

13. Is it you and I who are crazy, or is it everybody else?

14. Strangely enough, this is the past that somebody in the future is longing to go back to.

15. The majority is never right, unless it includes me.

16. Dying is a part of living, but only a very small part.

17. Nothing really matters except a few things that really don't matter very much.

18. Things are gradually falling into place on top of me.

19. A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.

20. If you don't win, it's not a great tragedy - the worst that happens is that you lose a game.

21. Know the difference between a catastrophe and an inconvenience. - To realize that it's just an inconvenience, that it is not a catastrophe, but just an unpleasantness, is part of coming into your own, part of waking up.

22. Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot.

23. Comedy is tragedy plus time.

24. I bet you think an egg is something you casually order for breakfast when you can't think of anything else. Well, so did I once, but that was before the egg and I.

25. Humans are divided between those who can still look through the eyes of youth and those who cannot. Though it causes me frequent pain, I find it very easy to place myself in the shoes of almost any boy, and can conjure my own youth with an ease that is troublesome.

26. The people who send us fan mail written in blood say the nicest things, so it doesn't freak us out too much.

27. The ability to perceive or think differently is more important than the knowledge gained.

28. It sometimes takes a foreigner to come and see a place and paint it. I remember someone saying they had never really noticed the palm trees here until I painted them.

29. There are things I can't force. I must adjust. There are times when the greatest change needed is a change of my viewpoint.

30. The psychological profiling [of a programmer] is mostly the ability to shift levels of abstraction, from low level to high level. To see something in the small and to see something in the large.

31. But romantic vision can also lead one away from certain very hard, ugly truths about life that are important to know.

32. That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.

33. When I get sick of what men do, I have only to walk a few steps in another direction to see what spiders do. Or what the weather does. This sustains me very well indeed.

34. In a sense, one can never read the book that the author originally wrote, and one can never read the same book twice.

35. Tomorrow is a satire on today, And shows its weakness.

36. A pessimist is a man who has been compelled to live with an optimist.

37. I would rather be able to appreciate things I can not have than to have things I am not able to appreciate.

38. Life is just one damned thing after another.

39. Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.

40. Old age equalizes - we are aware that what is happening to us has happened to untold numbers from the beginning of time. When we are young we act as if we were the first young people in the world.

41. I pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba and cry, 'Tis all barren!

42. I had been coming to America very frequently for many, many years, so I had plenty of exposure - and maybe the best kind of exposure, because I think first impressions are very important. Maybe I notice stuff that is just subliminal to people who live here all the time.

43. It is safer to try to understand the low in the light of the high than the high in the light of the low. In doing the latter one necessarily distorts the high, whereas in doing the former one does not deprive the low of the freedom to reveal itself as fully as what it is.

44. Man is the microcosm: I am my world.

45. I am my world. (The microcosm.) (5.63)

46. If a lion could talk, we could not understand him (II, xi; p. 223 of the 1968 English edn.)

47. Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one.

48. I thank Thee first because I was never robbed before; second, because although they took my purse they did not take my life; third, because although they took my all, it was not much; and fourth because it was I who was robbed, and not I who robbed.

49. When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?

50. Quelle verite que ces montagnes bornent, qui est mensonge qui se tient au dela?

51. It is the mind that maketh good or ill, That maketh wretch or happy, rich or poor.

52. There are some defeats more triumphant than victories.

53. The devil is an angel too.

54. From the heights of these pyramids, forty centuries look down on us.

55. We sometimes had those little rubs which Providence sends to enhance the value of its favors.

56. And, after all, what is a fashion? From the artistic point of view, it is usually a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

57. We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

58. A thing is, according to the mode in which one looks at it.

59. I've done a lot worse than jump off piers, son. Like throw a television out the window.

60. I like the smell of armpits in the morning. It's like victory.

61. The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun.

62. 'There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself, 'Do trousers matter?'' 'The mood will pass, sir.'

63. It just showed once again that half the world doesn't know how the other three quarters live.

64. Si hubiera una sola verdad, no se podrian hacer cien lienzos sobre un mismo tema.

65. Earth is blue like an orange.

66. There is another world and it is in this one.

67. Ah well, perhaps one has to be very old before one learns how to be amused rather than shocked.

68. I became mentally bifocal, and so I learned early to understand that there is no such condition in human affairs as absolute truth. There is only truth as people see it, and truth, even in fact, may be kaleidoscopic in its variety. The damage such perception did to me I have felt ever since, although damage may be too dark a word, for it merely meant that I could never belong entirely to one side of any question. To be a Communist would be absurd to me, as absurd as to be entirely anything and equally impossible. I straddled the globe too young.

69. I am comforted by life's stability, by earth's unchangeableness. What has seemed new and frightening assumes its place in the unfolding of knowledge. It is good to know our universe. What is new is only new to us.

70. My dad was part of the pioneers of public broadcasting in Canada. And he always told me the most important thing you can be in your career is fair. So we all start to see a box and hope that we see the box in the same way. But you recognize in time that people see the box or they see traffic accidents in entirely different ways. So you train yourself over the years to try and give accounting to the variety... and come to some decent place in the middle. But I'm not a slave to objectivity. I'm never quite sure what it means. And it means different things to different people.

71. 'Everything is true', he said. 'Everything anybody has ever thought'.

72. In sterculino plurimum gallus potest.

73. I never saw Portsmouth by day.

74. 'We pay lip service to multiracialism but we fail to put it into practice because we continue to see most things and ourselves from our own ethnic perspective. So long as the personal attitude persists, we will not see us one people of Fiji and our future will not be secure.'

75. Traveling is almost like talking with those of other centuries.

76. We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

77. Don't ever become a pessimist... a pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun, and neither can stop the march of events.

78. Early rising may not be a vice : but it is certainly no virtue. The old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed.

79. One man's theology is another man's belly laugh.

80. To be matter of fact about the world is to blunder into fantasy - and dull fantasy at that, as the real world is strange and wonderful.

81. I usually read the obituaries first as there is always the happy chance that one of them will make my day.

82. And gain is gain, however small.

83. Look not thou down but up! To uses of a cup.

84. Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns to be amused rather than shocked.

85. The world has room to make a bear feel free; The universe seems cramped to you and me.

86. He saw her from the bottom of the stairs Before she saw him. She was starting down, Looking back over her shoulder at some fear. She took a doubtful step and then undid it To raise herself and look again. He spoke Advancing toward her: 'What is it you see From up there always?-for I want to know.'

87. 'I can repeat the very words you were saying: 'Three foggy mornings and one rainy day Will rot the best birch fence a man can build.' Think of it, talk like that at such a time! What had how long it takes a birch to rot To do with what was in the darkened parlor? You couldn't care! The nearest friends can go With anyone to death, comes so far short They might as well not try to go at all.

88. A definite purpose, like blinders on a horse, inevitably narrows its possessor's point of view.

89. The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.

90. You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you're always in a compartment, and because you're used to it you don't realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You're a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.

91. When you look directly at an insane man all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that he's insane, which is not to see him at all. To see him you must see what he saw and when you are trying to see the vision of an insane man, an oblique route is the only way to come at it.

92. Sorrows remembered sweeten present joy.

93. Winds of the World, give answer! They are whimpering to and fro - And what should they know of England who only England know?

94. The road was new to me, as roads always are, going back.

95. When I was as you are now, towering in the confidence of twenty-one, little did I suspect that I should be at forty-nine, what I now am.

96. 'Sometimes you win by losing. Standard thinking said I was a loser; a man who couldn't make the grade at university; a quitter. (...) As it was, I had to open my eyes and look around; I had to be aware of what was going on around me.'

97. 'I think there are only two kinds of people in the world. My friends . . . and other people.'

98. You may say you attained some stage in your practice. But that is just a trivial event in your long life. It is like saying the ocean is round, or like a jewel, or palace. For a hungry ghost the ocean is a pool of blood; for a dragon the ocean is a palace; for a fish it is his house; for a human being it is water. There must be various understandings. When the ocean is a palace, it is a palace. You cannot say it is not a palace. For a dragon it is actually a palace. If you laugh at a fish who says it is a palace, Buddha will laugh at you who say it is two o'clock, three o'clock. It is the same thing.

99. Go then; there are other worlds than these.

100. Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.