Quotes about Perspective

Every tragedy is unique, just as every human is unique. When a person loses someone dear to her, who am I to say that my tragedy was greater? I have no right. For that person, her tragedy is the greatest in the world—and she is right in thinking so.

The secret is Christ in me, not me in a different set of circumstances.

We are not asked to SEE, said Amy. Why need we when we KNOW? We know--not the answer to the inevitable Why, but the incontestable fact that it is for the best. It is an irreparable loss, but is it faith at all if it is 'hard to trust' when things are entirely bewildering?

George Macdonald said, 'If you knew what God knows about death you would clap your listless hands', but instead I find old people in North America just buying this whole youth obsession. I think growing older is a wonderful privilege. I want to learn to glorify God in every stage of my life.

Let not him who accepts light in an instant despise him who gropes months in shadows.

The preoccupations of seventeen-year-old girls--their looks, their clothes, their social life--do not change very much from generation to generation. But in every generation there seem to be a few who make other choices. Amy was one of the few.

If you believe in a God who controls the big things, you have to believe in a God who controls the little things. It is we, of course, to whom things look "little" or "big.

He is not all we would ask for (if we were honest), but it is precisely when we do not have what we would ask for, and only then, that we can clearly perceive His all-sufficiency.

It is altogether fitting and proper that we should enjoy things made for us to enjoy. What is not at all fitting or proper is that we should set our hearts on them. Temporal things must be treated as temporal things - received, given thanks for, offered back, but enjoyed. They must not be treated like eternal things.

Nothing has done more damage to the Christian view of life than the hideous notion that those who are truly spiritual have lost all interest in the world and its beauties.

A few clear pronouncements on one side and a few honest questions on the other had, in a matter of minutes, shown me that life was not going to be as simple, ever again, as I had thought.

The word suffering is much too grand to apply to most of our troubles, but if we don't learn to refer the little things to God how shall we learn to refer the big ones? A definition which covers all sorts of trouble, great or small, is this: having what you don't want, or wanting what you don't have. The vicissitudes of travel furnish plenty of what Janet Erskine Stuart calls "blessed inconveniences," occasions which fit both categories in our definition.