60 Quotes About Perspective-on-life

If {Death} comes for you?” he said. “Would you be so sanguine then?” She laughed and the pensiveness was gone. “No indeed. I will curse the stars and go down fighting. But it will still have been a wonderful thing, to cross the mist.

Readers of Darwin's life, for instance, and particularly of the published correspondence of Darwin, are henceforth naturalists in the making. Ever afterwards they are Darwins on a small scale, seeing animals and plants in an entirely different light and with a correspondingly keener interest.

Even as a child, I had a sense that I was two people; the one who experienced the trauma, the pain, the happiness, and the other who stood aside and watched with a disinterested ironic eye.

And there is an earlier Wilson cycle, too, a billion years old, entrapped alongside the Appalachians: the Grenville, which rises to the surface in Central Park, New York, to remind us that the human and urban is no more than foam on the sea of the past.

Although routinely criticized, a pessimist attitude enables a person never to be disappointed with the vagrancies of life or frustrated by the outcome of any event. A pessimist prepares for reality by considering every possible contingency. Having reckoned with the worst possible circumstances, and game planned what to do in the event of the most drastic outcome, a pessimist is pleasantly surprised when they achieve a better than expected result.

I cannot be defeated unless I decide that today is the day I stop trying.

Be careful in an emotional moment not to allow your temper to control your actions leading to poor choices that you will later regret.

When life gives you lemon, don’t just make lemonade…make lemon meringue pie…make lemon tart…make lemon chiffon cake…make lemon liqueur…make lemon vinaigrette…make lemon pickle…Then set up shop and make your millions.

It’s tempting to think of yourself as powerful when those around you are far less so, but compared to the simple fact of existence, to the power of life and how it hangs on, we are nothing.