Quotes about Perspective
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.
— Henri Nouwen
The situation which brought about your pain was simply the form in which you came in touch with the human condition of suffering.
— Henri Nouwen
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
— Henri Nouwen
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.
— Henri Nouwen
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.
— Henri Nouwen
detach ourselves from making our individual experience the criterion for our approach to others
— Henri Nouwen
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.
— Henri Nouwen
The reward of choosing joy is joy itself.
— Henri Nouwen
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.
— Henri Nouwen
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.
— Henry B. Eyring
It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are... than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.
— Henry David Thoreau
If you want to be happy, be!
— Henry David Thoreau