Quotes about Perspective

Before we can see that created things (especially material) are unreal, we must see clearly that they are real.

So much depends on our idea of God! Yet no idea of Him, however pure and perfect, is adequate to express Him as He really is. Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him. We

It is when we insist most firmly on everyone else being "reasonable" that we become, ourselves, unreasonable.

In humility is the greatest freedom. As soon as you begin to take yourself seriously and imagine that your virtues are important because they are yours, you become the prisoner of your own vanity and even your best works will blind and deceive you. Then, in order to defend yourself, you will begin to see sins and faults everywhere in the actions of other[s].

Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.

From him I have learned that prayer is not asking for what you think you want but asking to be changed in ways you can't imagine. To be more grateful, more able to see the good in what you have been given instead of always grieving for what might have been.

Conversion is seeing ourselves, and the ordinary people in our families, our classrooms, and on the job, in a new light. Can it be that these very people—even the difficult, unbearable ones—are the ones God has given us, so that together we might find salvation?

Like an exasperating but invaluable friend, the Bible keeps bringing me back to my senses, often in bracing (and comical) ways.

In our culture, time can seem like an enemy....But the monastic perspective welcomes time as a gift from God and seeks to put it to good use rather than allowing us to be used up by it.....Liturgical time is essentially poetic time, oriented toward process rather than productivity, willing to wait attentively in stillness, rather than always pushing to get the job done

From now on we recognize no one according to the flesh" (2 Corinthians 5:16)—you are a brand-new creature! Old things have passed away and all things have become new. Now, beloved of God, live accordingly.

It is not a matter of whether one is biased or not. It is really a question of which bias is the best bias with which to be biased.

We Christians must build all of our thinking in every area on the Bible. We must start with God's Word, not the word of finite, fallible man. We must judge what people say on the basis of what God's Word says—not the other way around.