Quotes about Perspective

You have grown beyond supposing such actions to be either good or bad, and therefore it will be so much the easier to be tolerant of another's blindness.

So must a good ear, and a good smell be ready for whatsoever is either to be heard, or smelt: and a good stomach as indifferent to all kinds of food, as a millstone is, to whatsoever she was made for to grind. As ready therefore must a sound understanding be for whatsoever shall happen. But he that saith, O that my children might live! and, O that all men might commend me for whatsoever I do! is an eye that seeks after green things; or as teeth, after that which is tender.

Who himself is not the cause of his own unrest? Reflect how no one is hampered by any other; and that all is as thinking makes it so.

Give yourself a gift: the present moment. People out for posthumous fame forget that the Generations To Come will be the same annoying people they know now. And just as mortal. What does it matter to you if they say x about you, or think y?

Nothing that goes on in anyone else's mind can harm you. Nor can the shifts and changes in the world around you. —Then where is harm to be found? In your capacity to see it.

How foolish it is, then, to puff yourself up with pride or berate yourself with worry. Think of the boundless abyss of the past behind you and the infinite future stretching out ahead. From this perspective, how small are your achievements—and how petty your troubles.

If you are distressed about anything, the pain is not one to the thing but to your own estimate to it.

I often wonder how it is that most people value their own lives above others, yet value other's opinions of them over their own self-opinions.

that everything has always been the same, and keeps recurring, and it makes no difference whether you see the same things recur in a hundred years or two hundred, or in an infinite period; ii. that the longest-lived and those who will die soonest lose the same thing. The present is all that they can give up, since that is all you have, and what you do not have, you cannot lose.

Suppose that a god announced that you were going to die tomorrow "or the day after." Unless you were a complete coward you wouldn't kick up a fuss about which day it was—what difference could it make? Now recognize that the difference between years from now and tomorrow is just as small.

It is in our power to have no opinion about a thing.

In this infinity then what is the difference between him who lives three days and him who lives three generations? Always