Expanding Perspective Quotes

We feel that we have to be right so that we can feel good. We don’t want to be wrong because then we’ll feel bad. But we could be more compassionate toward all these parts of ourselves. The whole right and wrong business closes us down and makes our world smaller. Wanting situations and relationships to be solid, permanent, and graspable obscures the pith of the matter, which is that things are fundamentally groundless.

Look wide, and even when you think you are looking wide - look wider still.

I think if you just travel in general, it allows you to step outside of yourself and whatever you're familiar with.

The more you think about your own self, the more self-centred you are, the more trouble even small problems can create in your mind. The stronger your sense of 'I', the narrower the scope of your thinking becomes; then even small obstacles become unbearable. On the other hand, if you concern yourself mainly with others, the broader your thinking becomes, and life's inevitable difficulties disturb you less.

Your world could grow infinitely bigger if you were only willing to become...appropri ately small.

Development involves giving up a smaller story in order to wake up to a larger story.

Our inability to see the beauty doesn't suggest in the slightest that beauty is not there. Rather, it suggests that we are not looking carefully enough or with broad enough perspective to see the beauty.

Why limit yourself to what your eyes see when you have an opportunity to extend your vision?

The biggest obstacle to taking a bigger perspective on life is that our emotions capture and blind us.

Learn to see - accustoming the eye to calm, to patience, to letting-things-come-to-it; learning to defer judgment, to encircle and encompass the question on all sides.

Am I caught in a self-centred, narrow little cell which refuses to look beyond? Do I see it when you come along and tell me that my brain is the brain of all mankind?

Some people could look at a mud puddle and see an ocean with ships.

Adventurous reading allows one to escape a little from the provincialities of one's home culture and the blinders of one's narrow self.

There is a lesson that I learned at twelve - the world does not end at the edge of a quad. There are people outside. The world does not end on the Fourth Level. There are people elsewhere. It took me two years to learn to apply the lesson - that neither does the world end with the Ship. If you want to accept life, you have to accept the whole bloody universe. The universe is filled with people, and there is not a single solitary spear carrier among them.

I love the truth. Whether it's painful or wonderful, it always widens my perspective and changes me. It helps move me forward.

As long as you are seeing 'what is', you cannot grow beyond it.