All Quotes By Tag: Perspective

“I was transformed the dayMy ego shattered,And all the superficial, materialThings that matteredTo me before,Suddenly ceasedTo matter.”

“Success may require a lot of days. But progress only requires one.”

“When the vision is clear, the results will appear. Keep your mindset positive as you work your plan, flourish, and always remember why you started.”

“After the funeral, my life changed. I felt as if time were suddenly precious, water going down an open drain, and I could not move quickly enough. No more playing music at half-empty night clubs. No more writing songs in my apartment, songs that no one would hear.”

“At the point where he, today’s Ivan Ilyich, began to emerge, all the pleasures that had seemed so real melted away now before his eyes and turned into something trivial and often disgusting.And the further he was from childhood, the nearer he got to the present day, the more trivial and dubious his pleasures appeared. It started with law school. That had retained a little something that was really good: there was fun, there was friendship, there was hope. But in the last years the good times had become more exceptional. Then, at the beginning of his service with the governor, some good times came again: memories of making love to a woman. Then it became all confused, and the good times were not so many. After that there were fewer still; the further he went the fewer there were.Marriage. . .an accident and such a disappointment, and his wife’s bad breath, and all that sensuality and hypocrisy! And the deadlines of his working life, and those money worries, going on for a year, two years, ten, twenty – always the same old story. And the longer it went on the deadlier it became.’It’s as if I had been going downhill when I thought I was going uphill. That’s how it was. In society’s opinion I was heading uphill, but in equal measure life was slipping away from me…And now it’s all over. Nothing left but to die!”

“From time to time, Marvel enjoyed imagining himself from the vantage point of history, which stretches onward until the morality of events is winnowed until it appears to be fate—one action begetting the next and so on. Progress. This was the place where treachery and failure transformed themselves. What once seemed terrible could become courageous if given enough time. Marvel imagined that one day his sins might be tallied as virtues, that time could render him honorable, as he knew himself to be.”

“Every leaf that taps against the attic window, every thorn that nestles against the bricks, is part of a barrier that keeps the twentieth century at bay. I have always taken a dim view of the twentieth century, so that I consider this to be a laudable amibition.”

“The historian has a habit of saying of people in the past: ‘I think they may well be considered worthy of praise, allowing for the ideas of their times.’ There will never be really good history until the historian says, ‘I think they were worthy of praise, allowing for the ideas of my time.”

“Distance creates perspective, time ascertains it”

“An oil owner is someone who has claimed ownership of something that has been there for millions of years.”

“With time comes perspective.”

“Was then not all sorrow in time, all self-torment and fear in time? Were not all difficulties and evil in the world conquered as soon as one conquered time, as soon as one dispelled time?”

“It would mark the end of a year that he might look back on as hands, a pivot between two lines. Or not: maybe enough time, would pass that eventually he would look back on his life, all of it, as a series of events both logical and continuous.”

“We often hear about stepping outside ourselves, but rarely about stepping outside our generation.”

“Trust is not a gasoline-soaked blanket that succumbs to the matches of betrayal, never able to be used for its warmth again; it’s a tapestry that wears thin in places, but can be patched over if you have the right materials, circumstances, and patience to repair it. If you don’t, you’re always the one who feels the coldest when winter comes.”