#perspective

Cordelia: I personally don't think it's possible to come up with a crazier plan. Oz: We attack the Mayor with hummus. Cordelia: I stand corrected. Oz: Just keeping things in perspective. ↗

— Joss Whedon

#perspective #plans #humour

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

#perspective #space #experience

We are often taught to look for the beauty in all things, so in finding it, the layman asks the philosopher while the philosopher asks the photographer. ↗

— Criss Jami

#beauty #finding #layman #modeling #perspective

In a world of prayer, we are all equal in the sense that each of us is a unique person, with a unique perspective on the world, a member of a class of one. ↗

— W. H. Auden

#each #equal #member #person #perspective

Though my books are written from a historical perspective, I have goon so far back that I am in the realm of prehistorical speculation rather than simple historical fact to weave my stories around. ↗

— Jean M. Auel

#around #back #books #fact #far

I sort of leave the character at the end of the day. I don't carry anything around with me - no excess baggage or unnecessary thoughts. I think it's too exhausting to do that. To put things into perspective - your work is your work, and your leisure time is something else. ↗

— Sean Bean

#around #baggage #carry #character #day

Similarly, it is argued that the culture of Islam is incompatible with democracy. Basically, this conventional perspective of the Middle East thus contends that democracy in that region is neither possible nor even desirable. ↗

— Recep Tayyip Erdogan

#basically #conventional #culture #democracy #desirable

How Horrid" has a slightly facetious tone that strikes me as Wildean. It appears to embrace the actual horror--puberty, public disgrace--then at the last second nimbly sidesteps it, laughing. ↗

— Alison Bechdel

#perspective #rhetoric #home

The irony of that is, what makes it kind of ironic, is when you do become successful as a professional athlete in particular, a lot of the young children who are emulating these stars do have a different perspective. ↗

— Frank Shorter

#become #children #different #different perspective #ironic

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

#mortality #perspective #business