Quotes about Perspective

The tragic sense of life is ironically not tragic at all, at least in the Big Picture. Living in such deep time, connected to past and future, prepares us for necessary suffering, keeps us from despair about our own failure and loss, and ironically offers us a way through it all. We are merely joining the great parade of humanity that has walked ahead of us and will follow after us. The tragic sense of life is not unbelief, pessimism, fatalism, or cynicism.

most people do not see things as they are, they see things as they are!

We see what we are ready to see, expect to see, and even desire to see.

One cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be of little importance in the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie. —CARL JUNG, THE STRUCTURE AND DYNAMICS OF THE PSYCHE As

We become what we are willing to see.

Responding to John the Baptist's hard-line approach, Jesus maintains both sides of this equation when he says, "No man born of woman is greater than John the Baptizer, yet the least who enters the kingdom of heaven is greater than he is" (Matthew 11:11). Is that double-talk? No, it is second-half-of-life talk.

Even with all the best intentions in the world, given our different temperaments, backgrounds, and the way we process our data and information, we are going to step on one another's toes. Two people with absolutely good will can deeply hurt one another. Good people hurt one another because we all come at reality in different ways. That's why, for Jesus, the only way to achieve union is through forgiveness, not through making sin impossible.

The concern was about getting the beginning right, and then life and eternity would take care of themselves. We have been preoccupied with getting the end right, for some reason.

The unprayerful heart will always twist reality to its own liking.

No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it." I

Albert Einstein is supposed to have said, "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.

Such a down-and-then-up perspective does not fit into our Western philosophy of progress, nor into our desire for upward mobility, nor into our religious notions of perfection or holiness.