Quotes about Perspective

It took years to find out that the cry for openness is never what it purports to be. What the person means by saying, "You must be open to everything" is really, "You must be open to everything that I am open to, and anything that I disagree with, you must disagree with too.

We have lost the shared meanings of pain, and so the shared meanings of victory become occasions for jealousy.

He wants us to see what it means to live through the lens of the eternal.

His stories are so Eastern

It is possible to hold a treasure in your hand but be ignorant of it and go for the wrapping instead. This proximity to truth and distance from its worth is repeated innumerable times in our lives.

Feelings follow belief; belief, then, should follow truth.

Isn't it amazing that we can go through life holding passionately to our views, yet never pausing to ask ourselves why that view is inviolable?

The frog is almost five hundred million years old. Could you really say with much certainty that America, with all its strength and prosperity, with its fighting man that is second to none, and with its standard of living that is highest in the world, will last as long as...the frog?

After all, what is a liver? My father, for example, died of cancer of the liver and was never sick a day in his life up till the moment it killed him. Never felt a twinge of pain. In a way, that was too bad, since I hated my father. Lust for my mother, you know.

Well, maybe it is true, Clevinger conceded unwillingly in a subded tone. Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it's to seem long. But in that event, who wants one? I do, Dunbar told him. Why? Clevinger asked. What else is there?

Homer begged and Rembrandt went bankrupt. Aristotle, who had money for books, his school, and his museum, could not have bought this painting of himself. Rembrandt could not afford a Rembrandt.

Why can't you be a fatalist about it the way I am? If I'm destined to unload these lighters at a profit and pick up some Egyptian cotton cheap from Milo, then that's what I'm going to do. And if you're destined to be killed over Bologna, then you're going to be killed, so you might just as well go out and die like a man. I hate to say this, Yossarian, but you're turning into a chronic complainer