c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
To make the world a better place, see the world as a better place.
— Alan Cohen
In my ninety-plus years, I have learned a secret. I have learned that when good men and good women face challenges with optimism, things will always work out! Truly, things always work out! Despite how difficult circumstances may look at the moment, those who have faith and move forward with a happy spirit will find that things always work out.
— Gordon B. Hinckley
Real optimism is not the pep talk you give yourself. It is earned through the labor involved in emotional housekeeping.
— Augusten Burroughs
I still think sincere pessimism the unpardonable sin.
— G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Optimism is denial for chumps with no life experience"."What's pessimism?" I said."Religion without God.
— Jonathan Kellerman
Optimism: That effervescent, blindingly- bright, perky, chipper, twittering quality you want to squash out of annoying people.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway
I've never been more hopeful about our future. I have never been more hopeful about America. And I ask you to sustain that hope. I'm not talking about blind optimism, the kind of hope that just ignores the enormity of the tasks ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. I'm not talking about the wishful idealism that allows us to just sit on the sidelines or shirk from a fight. I have always believed that hope is that stubborn thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us so long as we have the courage to keep reaching, to keep working, to keep fighting.
— Barack Obama
The reason why we believe that change is possible is not because we are idealists but because we believe we have made it, so other people can make it as well.
— Roméo Dallaire, They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children: The Global Quest to Eradicate the Use of Child Soldiers
They've been stepping on my toes for years. It's just a reason to get new boots.
— Steven Tyler
Real optimism is aware of problems but recognizes the solutions, knows about difficulties, but believes they can be overcome, sees the negatives but accentuates the positives, is exposed to the worst but exceeds the best, has reason to complain but chooses to smile.
— William A. Warden
Live with the assumption that every day it will rain. If it does, you were right. If it doesn’t, you were fortunate.
— Zack W. Van
Let me tell you something: when you dance, you are the greatest dancer who has ever lived. And when you sing, you will have the courage to raise your voice to the heavens, knowing that you may never get an answer.
— Emma Forrest
I have more enemies than I deserve," I said. "I am fighting a losing battle, me against the world. The next century is at stake. Time is running out and my optimism is sorely strained.""Yeah?" he said. "I was young once too.
— Felix Gilman, The Rise of Ransom City
Author describes one character's optimism as, that quiet well-being which perhaps you and I have felt on a sunny afternoon when, in our brightest youth and health, life has opened a new vista for us, and long to-morrows of activity have stretched before us like a lovely plain which there was no need for hurrying to look at, because it was all our own.
— George Eliot, Adam Bede
I think that one of the benefits of optimism and idealism is that they lead you into things you would never have tried if you'd let yourself imagine how hard it was going to turn out to be.
— Roméo Dallaire, They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children: The Global Quest to Eradicate the Use of Child Soldiers
If we define optimism broadly as the tendency to maintain a positive outlook, then realistic optimism is the tendency to maintain a positive outlook within the constraints of the available "measurable phenomena situated in the physical and social world" (DeGrandpre, 2000, p. 733). With respect to fuzzy meaning, realistic optimism involves enhancing and focusing on the favorable aspects of our experiences. Examples include being lenient in our evaluation of past events, actively appreciating the positive aspects of our current situation, and routinely emphasizing possible opportunities for the future. With respect to fuzzy knowledge, realistic optimism involves hoping, aspiring, and searching for positive experiences while acknowledging what we do not know and accepting what we cannot know.
— Sandra L. Schneider
What kind of woman was she? What kind of woman was it who called to me from that calamity on the Seventh Avenue line? What kind of woman do I love now, with a fealty that will not cease, not till my occluded arteries send their clots up to the spongy interiors in my skull and I go mute and slack? I love the kind of woman whose hair has gone gray in a not terribly flattering way, the kind who doesn't even notice how she has to keeps having to buy larger jeans, the kind who likes big cars because she doesn't like to be uncomfortable. I love this woman because she is gifted with astounding premonitory skills: no matter how uncertain, how despondent, how lost her mate feels, no matter how dire the circumstances, she nonetheless predicts that Everything will be roses.
— Rick Moody, Demonology: Stories
So desperate was Kugel for things to turn out for the best, proclaimed Professor Jove, that he couldn't stop worrying about the worst. Hope, said Professor Jove, was Solomon Kugel's greatest failing.
— Shalom Auslander, Hope: A Tragedy
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.
— Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden
Some people see the glass half full. Others see it half empty.I see a glass that's twice as big as it needs to be.
— George Carlin
We’re so self-important. Everybody’s going to save something now. “Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails.” And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. Save the planet, we don’t even know how to take care of ourselves yet. I’m tired of this shit. I’m tired of f-ing Earth Day. I’m tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is that there aren’t enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don’t give a shit about the planet. Not in the abstract they don’t. You know what they’re interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They’re worried that some day in the future they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn’t impress me.The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages … And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn’t going anywhere. WE are!We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam … The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?” Plastic… asshole.
— George Carlin
In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
— Bertrand Russell
It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.
— George Eliot, Middlemarch
It is the obvious which is so difficult to see most of the time. People say 'It's as plain as the nose on your face.' But how much of the nose on your face can you see, unless someone holds a mirror up to you?
— Isaac Asimov, I, Robot
What people in the world think of you is really none of your business.
— Martha Graham
What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, criscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.
— John Irving, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed
When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport
—  when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.
Often it isn't the mountains ahead that wear you out, it's the little pebble in your shoe.
— Muhammad Ali
The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close up.
— Chuck Palahniuk
Fairy Tales always have a happy ending.' That depends... on whether you are Rumpelstiltskin or the Queen.
— Jane Yolen, Briar Rose
Is someone different at age 18 or 60? I believe one stays the same.
— Hayao Miyazaki
If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.
— Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept
The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success
— Ian Fleming
For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.
— C.S. Lewis, The Magician's Nephew
While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.
— Dorothea Lange
It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.
— Neil Armstrong
The best things in life aren't things.
— Art Buchwald
loving people live in a loving world.hostile people live in a hostile world.same world.
— Wayne W. Dyer
The optimist sees the donut, the pessimist sees the hole.
— Oscar Wilde
If we are always arriving and departing, it is alsotrue that we are eternally anchored. One's destinationis never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.
— Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch
Distance lends enchantment to the view.
— Mark Twain
Would it be possible for me to see something from up there?" asked Milo politely."You could," said Alec, "but only if you try very hard to look at things as an adult does."Milo tried as hard as he could, and, as he did, his feet floated slowly off the ground until he was standing in the air next to Alex Bings. He looked around very quickly and, an instant later, crashed back down to the earth again."Interesting, wasn't it?" asked Alex."Yes, it was," agreed Milo, rubbing his head and dusting himself off, "but I think I'll continue to see things as a child. It's not so far to fall.
— Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
The body is our general medium for having a world.
— Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
All people at root are time optimists. We always think there's enough time to do things with other people. Time to say things to them. And then something happens and then we stand there holding on to words like 'if'.
— Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove
Silverfish looked down."Oh. Are you a dwarf?"Cuddy gave him a blank stare."Are you a giant?" He said."Me? Of course not!""Ah. Then I must be a dwarf, yes.
— Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms: The Play
It's one of those things a person has to do
—  sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.
We begin to learn wisely when we're willing to see world from other people's perspective.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
One man’s nonsense is another man’s sense.
— Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech.
— Martin Farquhar Tupper
For the Earth itself is a blossom, she says,on the star tree,pale with luminousocean leaves.
— Rolf Jacobsen
Sometimes the most scenic roads in life are the detours you didn't mean to take.
— Angela N. Blount, Once Upon an Ever After
We’re conditioned to think that our lives revolve around great moments. But great moments often catch us unaware – beautifully wrapped in what others may consider a small one.
— Kent Nerburn, Make Me an Instrument of Your Peace: Living in the Spirit of the Prayer of St. Francis
You can't see the world from somebody else's point of view and not be changed.
— Lena Coakley, Witchlanders
O: Hey youngman, you should respect me!Y: Hey oldman, you should understand me!
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
The huge problems we deal with every day are actually really small. We’re so focused on what bothers usthat we don’t even try to see our lives from a clearer perspective.
— Susane Colasanti, Something Like Fate
[T[his isn’t just “another day, another dollar.” It’s more like “another day, another miracle.” (213)
— Victoria Moran, Lit From Within: Tending Your Soul For Lifelong Beauty
Man is always inclined to regard the small circle in which he lives as the center of the world and to make his particular, private life the standard of the universe and to make his particular, private life the standard of the universe. But he must give up this vain pretense, this petty provincial way of thinking and judging.
— Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture
In the vast reaches of the dry, cold night, thousands of stars were constantly appearing, and their sparkling icicles, loosened at once, began to slip gradually toward the horizon.
— Albert Camus
The city glitters past us with its sharp edges, reminding us of how tiny, how weak, how totally unimportant we are.
— Joe Meno, Demons in the Spring
Indeed, I find that distance lends perspective and I often write better of a place when I am some distance from it. One can be so overwhelmed by the forest as to miss seeing the trees.
— Louis L'Amour, Education of a Wandering Man
A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person lives in a hostile world.
— Ken Keyes Jr., Handbook to Higher Consciousness
Things that are falling apart encourage me: whatever else, I’m in better shape than they are.
— Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye
Of course it was a terrible thing, and the world would be a much better place without someone in it who could do that, but did that mean we had to miss lunch?
— Jeff Lindsay, Dearly Devoted Dexter
Every single cell in the human body replaces itself over a period of seven years. That means there's not even the smallest part of you now that was part of you seven years ago.
— Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts
I'm a scientist and I know what constitutes proof. But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Every time I've done something that doesn't feel right, it's ended up not being right.
— Mario Cuomo
It's only a two-day hike. But it lasts a lifetime.
— National Geographic Society
I have always been taught to be proud of being Latina, proud of being Mexican, and I was. I was probably more proud of being a "label" than of being a human being, that's the way most of us were taught.
— Erin Gruwell, The Freedom Writers Diary
You spend a lot of time thinking about how awful the prison is rather than envisioning your future.
— Piper Kernan
Earth teach me to forget myself  as melted snow forgets its life.  Earth teach me resignation  as the leaves which die in the fall.  Earth teach me courage  as the tree which stands all alone.  Earth teach me regeneration  as the seed which rises in the spring.
— William Alexander
One just has to look at the thing from a perspective that interests you personally.
— Zadie Smith, White Teeth
A mountain still in the distance can appear as a molehill.
— Howard Fast, April Morning
Isn't it lucky?
— James Patterson
The willingness to reexamine lifelong beliefs because of conflicting data takes enormous courage, and contrasts sharply with recent examples of public discourse in which our political, cultural, and religious leaders have fit data to preconceived theories.
— Donal O'Shea, The Poincaré Conjecture: In Search of the Shape of the Universe
It's so difficult, isn't it? To see what's going on when you're in the absolute middle of something? It's only with hindsight we can see things for what they are.
— S.J. Watson, Before I Go to Sleep
I tried to put things in perspective but sometimes you're just too close to it.
— Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?
— George Orwell, 1984
It’s not a bad lesson to learn in the bleaker months: how you view a storm is a question of perspective; provided you find the right rock to watch it from, it could be the most incredible thing you’ll ever witness.
— Dan Stevens
In fact, the more each person can remove his or her ego from the discussion and focus on the subject matter, the more fruitful the conversation will be for all involved.
— Matthew Kelly, The Seven Levels of Intimacy: The Art of Loving and the Joy of Being Loved
Liberalism, contrary to popular belief, is facing backward in considering the injustice of its ancestors. Conservatism, contrary to popular belief, is facing forward in considering the psychology of its descendants. Definitively, it seems in the modern world that neither side really knows which direction it's facing, and men of the sharpest judgment are simply turned off from picking either of the poisons.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downwards through the mud and slush of opinion and tradition, and pride and prejudice, appearance and delusion, through the alluvium which covers the globe, through poetry and philosophy and religion, through church and state, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, till we come to a hard bottom that rocks in place which we can call reality and say, "This is and no mistake.
— Henry David Thoreau
No perspective, no perception.New perspective, new perception.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
If you can look at one of these waves and you don't believe that there's something greater than we are, then you've got some serious analyzing to do and you should go sit under a tree for a very long time.
— Laird Hamilton
I have in this War a burning private grudge—which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler (for the odd thing about demonic inspiration and impetus is that it in no way enhances the purely intellectual stature: it chiefly affects the mere will). Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
This place aint the same. It never will be. Maybe we've all got a little crazy. I guess if everbody went crazy together nobody would notice, what do you think?
— Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain
The whole of the world could be deduced from the smallest grain of sand, if one studied it closely enough.
— Christopher Paolini
...it occurred that the birds, whose twitters and repeated songs sounded so pretty and affirming of nature and the coming day, might actually, in a code known only to other birds," be the birds each saying 'Get away' or 'This branch is mine!' or 'This tree is mine! I'll kill you! Kill, kill!' Or any manner of dark, brutal, or self-protective stuff--they might be listening to war cries. The thought came from nowhere and made his spirits dip from some reason.
— David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
Essentially, perspective is a form of abstraction. It simplifies the relationship between eye, brain and object. It is an ideal view, imagined as being seen by a one-eyed, motionless person who is clearly detached from what he sees. It makes a God of the spectator, who becomes the person on whom the whole world converges, the Unmoved Onlooker.
— Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New
When you're at peace, you embrace the eternity.When you're confused, you be dazzled by doomsday.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
From the sky, everything looked fake. The buildings were doll houses. The cars were Matchbox racers. People scuttled about, but they weren’t really people anymore. Their little lives meant absolutely nothing from this altitude.
— P.S. Baber, Cassie Draws the Universe
No one looks at the mountains. But they were there, making them all look silly.
— Ross Macdonald, The Moving Target
You just had to get some idea of what matters and what doesn't, and how much, and try not to be scared of the stuff that doesn't. Put it in perspective.
— Lev Grossman, The Magicians
He would get up and go out into a world which seemed very unfamiliar, but with a tantalizing unfamiliarity like the world of boyhood to which an old man returns.
— Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men
But an inferior talent can only be graceful when it's carrying inferior ideas. And the more narrowly you can look at a thing the more entertaining you can be about it.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
It all depends on how we look at things, and not on how they are themselves
— Carl Young
We’re conditioned to think that our lives revolve around great moments. But great moments often catch us unaware – beautifully wrapped in what others may consider a small one. 
— Kent Nurburn
Perspective [is] a luxury when your head [is] constantly buzzing with a swarm of demons.
— Khaled Hosseini
People ask me what my greatest strengths are and I say perspective. The best way to get that is to meet people that are polar opposites; you learn the most from them. There are pieces of you that are inherently yours, but everything else is a collection of the things you’ve seen and the people you’ve met.
— Eddie Huang, Fresh Off the Boat: A Memoir
Was it the case that colours dimmed as the eye grew elderly? Or was it rather that in youth your excitement about the world transferred itself onto everything you saw and made it brighter?
— Julian Barnes, England, England
[W]hile the use of non-lethal weapons such as tasers and LEDIs may not necessarily reduce the number of civilian casualties, they have been largely accepted as the humane alternative to deadly force because they make the use of force appear far less dramatic and violent than it has in the past.Contrast, for instance, the image of police officers beating Rodney King with billy clubs as opposed to police officers continually shocking a person with a taser. Both are severe forms of abuse. However, because the act of pushing a button is far less dramatic and visually arresting than swinging a billy club, it can come across as much more humane to the general public. This, of course, draws much less media coverage and, thus, less bad public relations for the police.
— John W. Whitehead, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State
Lifting your eyes from the things of this world is an activity that must begin WHERE YOU ARE.
— K.P. Yohannan, Living in the Light of Eternity
He realized suddenly that it was one thing to see the past occupying the present, but the true test of prescience was to see the past in the future. Things persisted in not being what they seemed.
— Frank Herbert, Dune
All the anxiety over small things had burned off me in the fire of reentry, the fire of being afraid I was going to die.
— Jennifer Hayden, The Story of My Tits
A popular Harvard business professor urged his students to read the obituaries in the New York Times before they read anything else, in order to learn from the lives of great men.
— Georges F. Doriot
Don't be such a crybaby. The fucking world ended. Everyone's mother is dead, you pussy. Besides... we're on our way to talk to the people who cut you mom's head off... have some motherfucking perspective.
— Robert Kirkman, The Walking Dead, Vol. 26: Call to Arms
The Lord works in mysterious ways. What's true to one man, a wonder and a marvel, might not seem so to another, as God didn't intend it for him.
— Katherine Howe, Conversion
Nothing new about death, nothing new about deaths caused militarily. We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo on that night of March 9-10 than went up in vapor at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
— Ronald Schaffer, Wings of Judgment: American Bombing in World War II
The needs of a society determine its ethics, and in the Black American ghettos the hero is that man who is offered only the crumbs from his country's table but by ingenuity and courage is able to take for himself a Lucullan feast. Hence the janitor who lives in one room but sports a robin's-egg-blue Cadillac is not laughed at but admired, and the domestic who buys forty-dollar shoes is not criticized but is appreciated. We know that they have put to use their full mental and physical powers. Each single gain feeds into the gains of the body collective.
— Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
If you aren't outraged, then you just aren't paying attention
— Lisa Borden, The Alphabet of Avoidance: Simple Solutions to Immediately Replace 'Bad' Habits with Something Better...or Even, Nothing at All.
Becoming a lake has put a lot of things in perspective for me.
— Heather Christle
It looks a lot better from up here than it does down there, dont it? Yes. It does. There's a lot of things look better at a distance. Yeah? I think so. I guess there are. The life you've lived, for one. Yeah. Maybe what of it you aint lived yet, too.
— Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain
The perspective is more important than the perception
— Amit Abraham
The forest stretched on seemingly forever with the most monotonous predictability, each tree just like the next - trunk, branches, leaves; trunk, branches, leaves. Of course a tree would have taken a different view of the matter. We all tend to see the way others are alike and how we differ, and it's probably just as well we do, since that prevents a great deal of confusion. But perhaps we should remind ourselves from time to time that ours is a very partial view, and that the world is full of a great deal more variety than we ever manage to take in.
— Thomas M. Disch, The Brave Little Toaster
Comedy is tragedy standing on its head with its pants down.
— Chris Crutcher, Chinese Handcuffs
But of course these conjectures as to why God does what He does are probably of no more value than my dog's ideas of what I am up to when I sit and read.
— C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms
We spread our sleeping bags on the snow and crawled inside. The vantage point was dizzying. It was impossible to tell whether the comet was above us or we were above the comet; we were all falling through space, missing the stars by inches.
— Anne Fadiman, At Large and at Small: Familiar Essays
The circularity of influence was like a trail of dominoes falling in four dimensions. Each time one slapped another and fell to the ground, from a different vantage point it appeared knocked upright, ready to be slapped and fall again.  Everything was not merely relative, it was--how to put it? --relevant. Representational. Revealing. Referential and reverential both.
— Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men
I now saw, with great dismay, that what I had been carrying all this time was not a bowl but a book. This ruined everything.
— C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
The man who'll lay the last stone here isn't even born yet.
— André Aciman, Eight White Nights
We see only a part of the surface of things. The rest will be forever hidden from us, to be appreciated for its felt but unfathomed presence.
— Richard Taylor, Joys of Beekeeping
But twice-two-makes-four is for all that a most insupportable thing. Twice-two-makes-four is, in my humble opinion, nothing but a piece of impudence. Twice-two-makes-four is a farcical, dressed-up fellow who stands across your path with arms akimbo and spits at you.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead
However, do you know what? I am convinced that fellows like me who live in dark cellars must be kept under restraint. They may be able to live in their dark cellars for forty years and never open their mouths, but the moment they get into the light of day and break out they may talk and talk and talk...
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead
The Western church needs to regain its confidence in the role of outsiders, relocators who come in humility and grace to learn first and then to offer a different perspective.
— Craig Greenfield, Living Mission: The Vision and Voices of New Friars
He had refused fancy clothes or makeup for this interview. His philosophy was that death should to be embarrassing
—  he was not about to powder its nose.
You're Superman, thinking Kryptonite makes you invincible." 
— J.M. Darhower, Ghosted
Romanticizing comes with colored glasses of the most colored sort.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
They ask me, what will change if we change the perspective?I replied, “Everything.
— Nikhil Shrivastava, Because You Need This!
The CIO is that one leader who can see everything that is happening within the organization," says Victor Fetter, CIO of LPL Financial. "The CIO looks at every transaction and every customer service experience that takes place on the digital platform. With that unique perspective, the CIO understand where efficiency is happening and where it is not. The position, at its most basic level, has moved from someone who just accepted the way things were, to someone who uses that visibility to create aha moments for all leaders across the organization.
— Martha Heller, Be the Business: CIOs in the New Eras of IT
Early one beautiful summer evening, when everyone else was drinking indoors, Tony and I walked down to the river. We lay on the grass under a tree and chatted. At one point, Tony said, "Look at the pattern of lace the leaves make against the sky." I looked at the canopy above us, and suddenly saw what he saw. My perspective completely shifted. I realized I didn't have his "eyes" -- though once he pointed it out, it became obvious. It made me think, "My God, I never look enough," and in the years since, I've tried very hard to look -- and look again.
— Julie Andrews Edwards, Home: A Memoir of My Early Years
Then the nurse did turn to glance, and then stare—actually stare—at me. His look made me feel as if I was green, or whistling, or dead.
— Rivka Galchen, Atmospheric Disturbances
My temperament and my instinct had told me alike that the author, who writes at his own emergency, remains and needs to remain at his private remove. I wished to be, not effaced, but invisible - actually a profound position. Perspective, the line of vision, the frame of vision - these set a distance.
— Eudora Welty, On Writing
Ask yourself this question: will this matter a year from now?
— Richard Carlson
Just because you don't like something doesn't mean it's bad.
— Scott Stabile
Why is it only now that I can see how many ordinary things are actually grotesque?
— Sara Baume, A Line Made by Walking
There is a sky full of stars aplenty, and all you can babble about is a cold, little rock we call the moon. This is how it is with petty problems that exist too close to us.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Slaying Dragons
Look at the lonely fisherman,' my father says.'Look at his view,' my mother says.
— Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora
Life is neither a glorious highlight reel nor a monstrous tragedy. Every day is a good day to live and a good day to die. Every day is also an apt time to learn and express joy and love for the entire natural world. Each day is an apt time to make contact with other people and express empathy for the entire world. Each day is perfect to accept with indifference all aspects of being.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
That it may be the only thing the darkness makes clearer: who really matters is whoever you're most desperate to see.
— Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire
Life is beautiful, but it is also so damn ugly.
— Mommy Moo Moo
You understand, we just don't fuck with truth.
— Charles Bukowski
It was one of those perfect nights, listening to the waves crash, feeling the warm summer breeze, watching the sun set over the ocean as the moon rose up in the sky. I looked out over the cliffs and I thought about the explorers who had sailed from places like this, what they'd accomplished, mapping the unknown world, charting our place in the universe. How many times had they failed and fallen down only to get back up and try again? How many times had they sailed out on an impossible voyage and made a successful return home? I sat there with Carola looking out over the endless horizon. It was strange, but I felt like everything was going to be okay. The end of my story was not yet written, and I still had the chance to make it extraordinary.
— Mike Massimino, Spaceman: An Astronaut's Unlikely Journey to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe
Behavior makes sense from the actor's perception or else the actor wouldn't do it. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, you know, today I'm going to be conforming, mistaken, nasty, and so on.
— Ellen J. Langer
Loved for is based on one's perception, you can easily spend a lifetime trying to define its definition.
— Tyconis D. Allison Ty
Now he wondered what use it would be. For Kaspar’s death would not bring back his father, Elk’s Call at Dawn, or his mother, Whisper of the Night Wind. His brother, Hand of the Sun, and his little sister Miliana would remain dead. The only time he would hear the voice of his grandfather, Laughter in His Eyes, would be in his memory. Nothing would change. No farmer outside Krondor would suddenly stand up in wonder and say, “A wrong has been righted.” No boot-maker in Roldem would look up from his bench and say, “A people has been avenged.
— Raymond E. Feist, King of Foxes
He knew there was only a slight difference between an armed guard and an escort, but sometimes that difference separated the honored and the condemned.
— Raymond E. Feist, Exile's Return
My father used to say, “a day spent breathing is a good day
— Raymond E. Feist, Exile's Return
People meet in the course of life, they talk together, they discuss, they quarrel, without realizing that they're talking to one another across a distance, each from an observation post standing in a different place in time.
— Milan Kundera, The Festival of Insignificance
Sometimes a problem isn’t really a problem but the solution in disguise.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Slaying Dragons
He would sit down and consider the situation carefully. Not only did this help to identify the solution to the problem, but it also gave him the opportunity to remind himself that things were not really as bad as they seemed; it was all a question of perspective. Sitting down and looking up at the sky for a few minutes--not at any particular part of the sky, but just at the sky in general--at the vast, dizzying, empty sky of Botswana, cut human problems down to size.
— Alexander McCall Smith, The Good Husband of Zebra Drive
I noticed that he was an Irish setter, rust-colored. He noticed that I was a Welsh sculptor, buff-colored (no, really, what did he notice? how does he think?) I reflected that he was probably a nice dog from a good home (bourgeois dog) but with certain unfortunate habits like jumping on people from high windows (rationalization: he is a member of the television generation and thus -)
— Donald Barthelme, Sixty Stories
The gulf between their world and hers had manifested itself, however much they'd meditated on how to ball her, and remained.
— Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly
A: But why this solitude? - B: I am not at odds with anyone. But when I am alone I seem to see my friends in a clearer and fairer light than when I am with them; and when I loved and appreciated music the most, I lived far from it. It seems I need a distant perspective if I am to think well of things.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality
Make information your servant, perspective your reward, and openness your principle.
— Ashlecka Aumrivani
It is a great mystery to me how the problems of others seem like simple arithmetic while my own appear as complicated as a calculus equation.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Slaying Dragons
The very best thing about landing in that grave? Perspective.So I peer through this morning's prism: a science test looming in second period, an a-hole of a coach who probably could have used more childhood therapy than I got, and a tell-tale tampon under my foot.I consider the clawed tiger on the bed, the one wearing the zebra-printed sports bra - the same tiger that every Sunday transforms into the girl who voluntarily walks next door to help sort Miss Effie's medicine into her days-of-the-week pill container. The one who pretended her ankle hurt one day last week so the backup settler on her volleyball team would get to play on her birthday.
— Julia Heaberlin, Black-Eyed Susans
Everything seems so small, so trivial, when you're on the right altitude.
— Joyce Rachelle
It's all about perspective. The sinking of the Titanic was a miracle to the lobsters in the ship's kitchen. (Oct 4, 2011)
— Wynne McLaughlin
In the perspective of our species, life has favored humanity as a whole by promoting as much wealth of variety and options as possible, and has distributed everything using the four winds. Life has given mankind everything it has, without segregation and without consideration of which characteristic or quality best suits the situations or the periods. Only by having the totality of human characteristics and options can we hope to deal with all periods to come.Our collective is our key to survival and well-being.
— Haroutioun Bochnakian, The Human Consensus and The Ultimate Project Of Humanity
Think More Not Less.
— Jelani Payne
I thought about the guy in the truck, the focus in his expression, and I felt like I already knew enough of the story to tell it to somebody else maybe better than either of its major players could.
— John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van
Utopia is a collective shift of perception away. Abundance is all around us. Only our efforts at tower-building blind us to it, our gaze forever skyward, forever seeking to escape this Earth, this feeling, this moment.
— Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible
We must each ascertain our own way to quantify the world. We can choose to peer at life harshly or benevolently. The prism that we select to view the world ultimately is the same standard that we employ to judge ourselves.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
lmost everything looked more beautiful from a distance, the earth becoming more perfect as one ascended and came closer to seeing the world from God's eyes, man's hovels and palaces disappearing, the peaks and valleys of geography fading to become strokes of a paintbrush on a divine sphere.
— Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Refugees
Death is a mirror that gives us a glimpse of who we really are.Death is a rearview mirror that puts the past into perspective.
— Mark Batterson, All In: You Are One Decision Away From a Totally Different Life
When we know that it's a planet just like this one, only with a better climate and worse people--when we know they're all propertarians, and fight wars, and make laws, and eat while other starve, and anyhow are all getting older and having bad luck and getting rheumatic knees and corns on their toes just like people there...when we know all that, why does it still look so happy--as if life there must be happy?..."... "If you can see the whole thing," he said, "it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives....But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the art is, is to see it as the moon. They way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.
— Ursula K. Le Guin
It is much more difficult to deal with the truth about your life when you have no idea that you have feet of clay and it suddenly begins to rain.
— Sheila Walsh, Loved Back to Life: How I Found the Courage to Live Free
If your callswere measures of Time,a day would last a centuryand in between us would beAn Eternity.
— Natasha Tsakos
A distorted perspective of mankind is a terrible independence
— Sunday Adelaja
The work of God does not mean so much man's work for God, as God's own work through man.
— Hudson Taylor, A Retrospect
He was as bold as a lion about it, and 'mightily convinced' not only himself, but everybody that heard him;—but then his idea of a fugitive was only an idea of the letters that spell the word,—or at the most, the image of a little newspaper picture of a man with a stick and bundle, with "Ran away from the subscriber" under it. The magic of the real presence of distress,—the imploring human eye, the frail, trembling human hand, the despairing appeal of helpless agony,—these he had never tried. He had never thought that a fugitive might be a hapless mother, a defenseless child,—like that one which was now wearing his lost boy's little well-known cap; and so, as our poor senator was not stone or steel,—as he was a man, and a downright noble-hearted one, too,—he was, as everybody must see, in a sad case for his patriotism.
— Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
It's pretty generally understood that men don't aspire after the absolute right, but only to do about as well as the rest of the world. Now, when any one speaks up, like a man, and says slavery is necessary to us, we can't get along without it, we should be beggared if we give it up, and, of course, we mean to hold on to it,—this is strong, clear, well-defined language; it has the respectability of truth to it; and, if we may judge by their practice, the majority of the world will bear us out in it. But when he begins to put on a long face, and snuffle, and quote Scripture, I incline to think he isn't much better than he should be.
— Harriet Beecher Stowe
They may call your victories, "lucky"...They may mock your failures...They may laugh at your heartache...But still, they will never be happy. This is the cyclical emptiness of the hater mindset.
— Steve Maraboli
Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot.
— Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer
You may never understand us, so it's natural you don't give a good manner towards us. It's logical.
— Kushiro Shoko
Perspective is so interesting. The smallest thing becomes pleasurable when troubles are monumental.
— Sandra Vischer, Unliving the Dream
To have an eye for opportunity is to be a Data Scientist.
— Damian Mingle
It is hard to explain just how a single sight of a tangible object with measurable dimensions could so shake and change a man
—  and we may only say that there is about certain outlines and entities a power of symbolism and suggestion which acts frightfully on a sensitive thinker’s perspective and whispers terrible hints of obscure cosmic relationships and unnamable realities behind the protective illusions of common vision.
Your labels don’t limit me… they limit your experience of me.
— Steve Maraboli
We’re always looking, but we never really see.
— Milton Glaser
Ask yourself this question: 'Will this matter a year from now?
— Richard Carlson
If you allow the life to happen, by connecting with your inner world, then you don’t have to worry about the changes with your perception or the change in the outside world. All you have to do is to follow your inner truth, to reach to your destination.
— Roshan Sharma
If you simply get detach from yourself, it gets easier for you to see, how you perceive life.
— Roshan Sharma
Whether a thought is spoken or not, it is a real thing and has powers of reality.
— Frank Herbert
You can only carry the illusive personality in your mind until you realize the truth behind it, but the time you realize the truth, you just cannot hold the illusive self of yours, in the mind.
— Roshan Sharma
My lyrics aren't offensive. Some people find everything offensive.
— Tyler, the Creator
The best way to understand life is to understand one’s own perspective towards life and rise above it. You have the higher intelligence in you, that allows you to perceive life, beyond an individuals perspective.
— Roshan Sharma
Apathy is the opposite of caring. If you’re apathetic towards something, then it isn’t something you want.
— Akiroq Brost