Quotes about Perspective

I have always been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted; then I realized that the interruptions were my work.

Two people can be part of the same event, but one may choose to live it quite differently from the other. One may choose to trust that what happened, painful as it may be, holds a promise. The other may choose despair and be destroyed by it. What makes us human is precisely this freedom of choice.

I asked him how he had been able to take such a splendid picture. With a smile he said, "Well, I had only to be very patient and very attentive. It was only after a few hours of compliments that the lily was willing to let me take her picture.

The situation which brought about your pain was simply the form in which you came in touch with the human condition of suffering.

If you look at every flower individually, they look quite miserable. Put them together in a vase and they become a bouquet and that's quite attractive. I think about our community often in that way

Our lives can indeed be seen as a process of becoming familiar with death, as a school in the art of dying. I do not mean this in a morbid way. On the contrary, when we see life constantly relativized by death, we can enjoy it for what it is: a free gift.

While visiting the University of Notre Dame, where I had been a teacher for a few years, I met an older experienced professor who had spent most of his life there. And while we strolled over the beautiful campus, he said with a certain melancholy in his voice, "You know,… my whole life I have been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted, until I discovered that my interruptions were my work.

detach ourselves from making our individual experience the criterion for our approach to others

We have very little control over what happens in our lives, but we have a lot of control over how we integrate and remember what happens.

The reward of choosing joy is joy itself.

From God's perspective, one hidden act of repentance, one little gesture of selfless love, one moment of true forgiveness is all that is needed to bring God from his throne to run to his returning son and to fill the heavens with sounds of divine joy.

Is there any conflict between science and religion? There is no conflict in the mind of God, but often there is conflict in the minds of men.