Quotes about perspective

The most dangerous form of blindness is believing that your perspective is the only reality.

The student loan payments feel endless, until you meet someone who never got to go to school.

The road to hell feels like heaven. The road to heaven often feels like hell.

If you can't change a situation, change your perception of it. Remember, most of your stress comes from the way you respond, not the way life is.

The dishes piling up are exhausting, until you set the table for one.

A crying baby on the plane is annoying, until you're the one who can't have one.

We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.

Men are disturbed not by things, but by their opinions about them.

He who knows does not speak; he who speaks does not know.

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear a hundred battles.

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

If you are pained by anything external, it is not this thing that disturbs you, but your own judgement of it.

Remember that all is opinion.

The longest-lived and the shortest-lived man, when they come to die, lose one and the same thing.

As for life, it is a battle and a sojourning in a strange land; but the fame that comes after is oblivion.

Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself. Love possesses not nor would it be possessed; For love is sufficient unto love.

Love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

Against that positivism which stops before phenomena, saying "there are only facts," I should say: no, it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations.

Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.

If I am pressed to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because it was he; it was I.

Things are not so painful and difficult in themselves, but our weakness and cowardice make them so.

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

He to whom the present is the only thing that is present knows nothing of the age in which he lives.

If you shed tears when you miss the sun, you also miss the stars.

We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.

Greater virtues are required to bear good fortune than bad.

We are never as happy or as miserable as we imagine.

Neither the sun nor death can be gazed upon steadily.

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakes.

For it all depends on how we look at things, and not on how they are in themselves. The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.

To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it. It is to be able to use it as an instrument instead of being used by it.

If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death.

An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.

You are that awareness, disguised as a person.

All types of knowledge ultimately mean self knowledge.

Don't think, feel. It is like a finger pointing a way to the moon. Don't concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory.

Life itself is your teacher, and you are in a state of constant learning.

Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world.

The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts.

The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.

He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

Remember that it is not he who gives abuse or blows who affronts, but the view we take of these things as insulting.

Everything has two handles, the one by which it may be carried, the other by which it cannot.

Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment intuition.

Many of the faults you see in others, dear reader, are your own nature reflected in them.

God turns you from one feeling to another and teaches by means of opposites, so that you will have two wings to fly, not one.

When we see men of worth, we should think of equaling them; when we see men of a contrary character, we should turn inwards and examine ourselves.

When I walk along with two others, they may serve me as my teachers.

Only after winter comes do we know that the pine and the cypress are the last to fade.

One swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.

We are busy that we may have leisure, and make war that we may live in peace.

Hope is the dream of a waking man.

Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead.

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe." He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

Let others complain that the age is wicked; my complaint is that it is paltry; for it lacks passion.

The greatest danger, that of losing one’s own self, may pass off as quietly as if it were nothing.

The crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.

We can be deceived by believing what is untrue, but we certainly are also deceived by not believing what is true.

Marry, and you will regret it. Do not marry, and you will also regret it. Marry or do not marry, you will regret it either way.

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails gives him ample opportunity to add a deeper meaning to his life.

Stars can't shine without darkness.

Stop being afraid of what could go wrong and start being excited about what could go right.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.

If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

God is dead.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, What! You too? I thought I was the only one.

All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost.

The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.

A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Beauty will save the world.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

Your vibe attracts your tribe.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.

I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.

You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.

I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens.

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.

You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched, but just felt with the heart.

We know only too well that what we are doing is nothing more than a drop in the ocean. But if the drop were not there, the ocean would be missing something.

We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.

It always seems impossible until it's done.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.

A negative mind will never give you a positive life.

Experience is the hardest kind of teacher. It gives you the test first and the lesson afterward.

If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it.

Tell all the truth but tell it slant.

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.

The world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.

Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.

Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.

When they go low, we go high.

He is the Subject, he is the Absolute: she is the Other.

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.

To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control.

Emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature, they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself.

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability.

Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.

Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

Good sense is the most fairly distributed thing in the world.

In order to seek truth, it is necessary once in the course of our life to doubt, as far as possible, all things.

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.

A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.

Custom, then, is the great guide of human life.

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

The money we possess is the instrument of freedom; the money we pursue is the instrument of servitude.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

Hell is other people.

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that, in the modern world, the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

Nature loves to hide.

I am a citizen of the world.