Quotes about Perspective

Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.

I can sympathize with people's pains, but not with their pleasure. There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.

What's the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you?

To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.

Was and will make me ill, I take a gram and only am.

A funny little literary article in the hand is worth at least three Critiques of Pure Reason in the bush.

Happiness is a hard master - particularly other people's happiness.

Fortunately, however, birds don't understand pep talks. Not even St. Francis'. Just imagine, he went on, preaching sermons to perfectly good thrushes and goldfinches and chiff-chaffs! What presumption! Why couldn't he have kept his mouth shut and let the birds preach to him?

We float in language like icebergs — four-fifths under the surface and only one-fifth of us projecting into the open air of immediate, non-linguistic experience.

Other people can't make you see with their eyes. At the best they can only encourage you to use your own.

Happiness is a hard master- particularly other people's happiness. A much harder master, if one isn't conditioned to accept it unquestioningly, than truth.

He defined philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct. As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons — that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.