Universal Perspective Quotes

From a universal perspective, what you do matters less than how you feel about what you do. ~ Eric Micha'el Leventhal

In order to understand the universal perspective,
first you have to know more than a version of truth. ~ Toba Beta

I am definitively not a 'universalist'".

~R. Alan Woods [2012] ~ R. Alan Woods

Kindness is unconquerable, so long as it is without flattery or hypocrisy. For what can the most insolent man do to you, if you contrive to be kind to him, and if you have the chance gently advise and calmly show him what is right...and point this out tactfully and from a universal perspective. But you must not do this with sarcasm or reproach, but lovingly and without anger in your soul. ~ Marcus Aurelius

Whatever the universal perspective one adopts, it is important to recognise that some form of universalism is politically and ethically necessary. ~ Alison Assiter

Ethically and politically it is important to face up to the need for a universal perspective in our divided, multi-cultural, unequal and unjust world. ~ Alison Assiter

It must be pointed out, however, that strictly speaking it is incorrect to talk of the dominance of the pleasure principle over the course of mental processes. If such a dominance existed, the immense majority of our mental processes would have to be accompanied by pleasure or to lead to pleasure, whereas universal experience completely contradicts any such conclusion. ~ Sigmund Freud

It's nothing more than a mental habit to idealize another time, another condition, another reality. It is simply a way to avoid the reality of our lives right now. And in avoiding the reality of our present circumstances, we avoid the miracles they offer. Everyone does it because that's the way the ego mind works. But we can stare down this self-defeating habit and cultivate a truer perspective: that wherever we are is the perfect place, and whatever time it is now is the perfect time. That doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't improve things, particularly ourselves. But indulging the thought that if only we were somewhere else things would be better is a surefire way to experience pain. ~ Marianne Williamson

No one promised you there would be universal justice. ~ John L. Parker Jr.

Get some perspective. A lot of things that may aggravate you only do so because you have the luxury of not wrestling with bigger issues. Today, be thankful for everything you have: being alive, your friends and family, your health, a roof over your head, something to eat, clean water to drink, indoor plumbing, heating, air conditioning, clothes, shoes, a job, and freedoms. Many, many people have it worse. ~ Dinah Sanders

If we've been born once already (which we know we have) why then is it so hard for some to believe that we've been born before? The answer to that is nothing other than the information about life one has previously received. ~ Renée Chae

Any critical engagement with racism requires us to understand the tyranny of the universal. For most of our history, the very category "human" has not embraced Black people and people of color. Its abstractness has been colored white and gendered male...If indeed all lives mattered, we would not need to emphatically proclaim Black Lives Matter. ~ Angela Y. Davis

Think of your goal as giving your child a kind of inoculation, providing him with the unconditional love, respect, trust, and sense of perspective that will serve to immunize him against the most destructive effects of an overcontrolling environment or an unreasonable authority figure. ~ Alfie Kohn

As grown-ups, dare we admit to ourselves that we, too, have a collective immaturity of view? Dare we admit that our thoughts and behaviors spring from a belief that the world revolves around us? Apparently not. Yet evidence abounds. Part the curtains of society's racial, ethnic, religious, national, and cultural conflicts, and you find the human ego turning the knobs and pulling the levers.
Now imagine a world in which everyone, but especially people with power and influence, holds an expanded view of our place in the cosmos. With that perspective, our problems would shrink - or never arise at all - and we could celebrate our earthly differences while shunning the behavior of our predecessors who slaughtered one another because of them. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Of the many strange things Einstein's work revealed, the fluidity of time is the hardest to grasp. Whereas everyday experience convinces us that there is an objective concept of time's passage, relativity shows this to be an artifact of life at slow speeds and weak gravity. Move near light speed, or immerse yourself in a powerful gravitational field, and the familiar, universal conception of time will evaporate. If you're rushing past me, things I insist happened at the same moment will appear to you to have occurred at different moments. If you're hanging out near the edge of a black hole, an hour's passage on your watch will be monumentally longer on mine. ~ Brian Greene

I say we must have a movement that brings those troops home and launch a crusade to transform our school buildings, we launch a crusade to see to it that every citizen has adequate and affordable housing, we launch a crusade to make universal health care. We need not soldiers anymore in the world. We've had enough of them in western history. ~ James Lawson

And you yourselves, ruling over your billions of neurons, what do you know about the impression of unity that is no more to be scorned than the rest of your experience? Listen, to be honest, I have the impression of living in a perpetual, universal fairyland, where things that can be explained are the exception. It seems to me that the normal is to the marvelous as the circle is to the ellipse: a specific instance, skimpy and impoverished, gutted of everything that makes conics powerful. Your ordinary trigonometry looks great next to these two focal points, the sine and cosine - both elliptical - whose relationship can only be expressed in a formula if you dare write in a little 'i', the sign of an imaginary number whose content you cannot imagine. Is the square root of -1 any more rational or thinkable than the action of a god on your soul? Both are proven by their effectiveness. ~ Georges Dumézil

This device became a big hit. Our new challenge became how to satisfy demand for it. To put this in perspective, we were a company composed of a handful of people with a new type of design and a fragile technology, housed in a little rented building, and we were trying to supply the seemingly insatiable appetite of large computer companies for memory chips. The ~ Andrew S. Grove

Because thankfulness is the tonic that always cures the cancers of greed, envy and jealously, it should be taken in liberal doses daily. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

I think the difference between being miserable and finding happiness is just a matter of perspective. If you live your life defining yourself by what other people think of you, it's a form of self-torture. ~ Sarah Silverman

Of all the universal lies she accepted unquestioningly, the happy ending was the most absurd. The hero and heroine lived happily ever after, and the ending seemed indisputable, definitive. No questions asked about how long love or happiness lasts in that 'forever' that can be divided into lifetimes, years, months. Even days ~ Arturo Perez Reverte

When I finished Westlife, we had - Louie Walsh is still managing me - I was lucky to have options from different labels such as Sony and Universal. When we met Capitol and Nick Raphael, I just believed in them the most, and it looked like they believed in me the most. ~ Shane Filan

For me, I can't understand something unless I've experienced it and I tend to be very judgmental by nature. But, it's very telling when you see the world from the other side of the lens because it opens the door to self-discovery. Perspective changes everything. I prefer empathy to sympathy if I have a choice. That's where the research comes in. I've packed a lot of life into the past few years trying to understand people and situations. Trying to make sense of my life. I have a lot to work through. My past is something that requires introspection and forgiveness. And that takes time. Research. When I feel like I've learned something about myself and grown as a person, I move on to the next journey. Hopefully with new perspective. ~ Kim Holden

The first step of gratitude is to see the gift ... if you are in the middle of difficulties and problems, how can you feel gratitude? You've got to fight to find the gift even in the difficulty ... when you shift your perspective from the perspective of the mind because life will never make sense to your mind ... mind is very logical and life is not. In order for life to make sense you've got to be out of your mind and you've got to be into your soul. When you begin to see life from the perspective of your soul then even in the midst of the worst of it you can see the gift. ~ Neale Donald Walsch

When we expand our thinking, we expand who we are as human beings: the perspective from which we view the world, and the concepts and values we use to guide our choices. ~ John Chaffee

The myth of quantum consciousness sits well with many whose egos have made it impossible for them to accept the insignificant place science perceives for humanity, as modern instruments probe the farthest reaches of space and time. ... quantum consciousness has about as much substance as the aether from which it is composed. Early in this century, quantum mechanics and Einstein's relativity destroyed the notion of a holistic universe that had seemed within the realm of possibility in the century just past. First, Einstein did away with the aether, shattering the doctrine that we all move about inside a universal, cosmic fluid whose excitations connect us simultaneously to one another and to the rest of the universe. Second, Einstein and other physicists proved that matter and light were composed of particles, wiping away the notion of universal continuity. Atomic theory and quantum mechanics demonstrated that everything, even space and time, exists in discrete bits – quanta. To turn this around and say that twentieth century physics initiated some new holistic view of the universe is a complete misrepresentation of what actually took place. ... The myth of quantum consciousness should take its place along with gods, unicorns, and dragons as yet another product of the fantasies of people unwilling to accept what science, reason, and their own eyes tell them about the world. ~ Victor J. Stenger

Freedom as a given seems the very antithesis of death. While we dread death, we generally consider freedom to be unequivocally positive. Has not the history of Western civilization been punctuated with yearnings for freedom, even driven by it? Yet freedom from an existential perspective is bonded to anxiety in asserting that, contrary to everyday experience, we do not enter into, and ultimately leave, a well-structured universe with an eternal grand design. Freedom means that one is responsible for one's own choices, actions, one's own life situation. Though the word responsible may be used in a variety of ways, I prefer Sartre's definition: to be responsible is to "be the author of," each of us being thus the author of his or her own life design. We are free to be anything but unfree: we are, Sartre would say, condemned to freedom. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

The fact that illness is associated with the poor
who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one's midst
reinforces the association of illness with the foreign with an exotic, often primitive place. ~ Susan Sontag

From a male perspective, you don't think about how much outward pressure and importance you put on how women look. ~ Benjamin Koldyke

[I]f one is to learn from history, one should not concentrate solely upon a single portion of an era but rather make a thorough investigation of the many complex and mutually contradictory factors that made the era what it was. One must take the single portion and fit it into its proper place. One must evaluate the various elements that went into giving it its special character. Thus one must look at history from a perspective that offers a broad and balanced view.
This, I believe, is what is meant by learning from history. For any man's view of his own era is limited, and he has great difficulty in trying to obtain a comprehensive picture of his time. Precisely because of this, then, the comprehensive picture offered by history both provides information and constitutes a pattern for one's guidance. A man who lives bound by the limits of the minute-to-minute present is able, by means of the broad vision offered by time-transcending history, to avail himself of a comprehensive picture of his world and so correct his own narrow view of things. Such is the enjoyable privilege that history offers men.
Learning from history should never mean fastening upon a particular aspect of a particular era and using it as a model to reform a particular aspect of the present. To take out of the jigsaw puzzle of the past a piece with a set form and attempt to fit it into the present is not an enterprise that could have a happy outcome. To do so is to toy with history, a pastime fit ~ Yukio Mishima

Islam teaches tolerance, not hatred; universal brotherhood, not enmity; peace, and not violence. ~ Parwez Musharraf

Constellations of thought hard wired to the universal energies between us resonate as a familiar hum that gently vibrates to caress my soul. ~ Truth Devour

The victimisation, I saw, was universal. It didn't depend on poverty, on lack of education or on tradition. It didn't depend on any of the things I had thought it depended on. Men took it everywhere with them. ~ Tsitsi Dangarembga

There is, perhaps, one universal truth about all forms of human cognition: the ability to deal with knowledge is hugely exceeded by the potential knowledge contained in man's environment. To cope with this diversity, man's perception, his memory, and his thought processes early become governed by strategies for protecting his limited capacities from the confusion of overloading. We tend to perceive things schematically, for example, rather than in detail, or we represent a class of diverse things by some sort of averaged typical instance. ~ Jerome Bruner

You understand, we just don't fuck with truth. ~ Charles Bukowski

Only when men are connected to large, universal goals are they really happy-and one result of their happiness is a rush of creative activity. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

I Always Knew I Carry The Key ... To The Universal Human Race,
Leader Petra Cecilia Maria Hermans
Religion of Blue Circle

December 6, 1972
Netherlands, Tilburg

May 2053
Completely in Harmony
In Silence and By Silence
Amen
God ~ Petra Hermans

Now there is living to give instead of to get. As you concentrate on the giving, you discover that just as you cannot receive without giving, so neither can you give without receiving - even the most wonderful things like health and happiness and inner peace. There is a feeling of endless energy, it just never runs out, it seems to be as endless as air. You seem to be plugged in to the source of universal energy. ~ Peace Pilgrim

When the heart sees injustice it turns to the perspective of oneness.
It feels no need to produce a big speech to overcome its enemies.
In silence it finds its peace. ~ Raphael Zernoff

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