Perspective

“Every day one should at least hear one little song, read one good poem, see one fine painting and — if at all possible — speak a few sensible words.”  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Krull, Kathleen. Albert Einstein. Viking, 2009.
“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. ”  Albert Einstein

 

“Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”  Marcus Aurelius, Roman ruler

“If ants had a language they would, no doubt, call their anthill an artifact and describe the brick wall in its neighborhood as a natural object. Nature in fact would be for them all that was not ‘ant-made’.”  C.S. Lewis

“Child, you have to learn to see things in the right proportions. Learn to see great things great and small things small.”  Corrrie Ten Boom

For books about people who have made a difference in the world, take a look at these biographies.

“When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.”  Alexander Graham Bell

Spinelli, Jerry. Smiles to Go. Joanna Cotler Books, 2008.
Ninth-grader Will has always relied on commonsense and scientific certainties. When he discovers that protons decay, he gains a new perspective on life and on his relationships with people.

 

“If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.”  Frances Hodgson Burnett in The Secret Garden

“Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.”  J.M. Barrie, author of  Peter Pan

“It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.”  George Eliot in Middlemarch

“For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.”  C.S. Lewis in The Magician’s Nephew

For stories about characters who find new perspectives, take a look at these novels.

 “The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”  Douglas Adams


Flux, Paul. Perspective. Heinemann Library, 2001.

“I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may, – light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.”  John Constable, British artist

“Every artist was first an amateur.”  Ralph Waldo Emerson

To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.  E.M. Forster

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”  Thomas Merton

To learn how to draw using perspective, check out the books in the art section of your library.

Drawings courtesy of Colton, Ina and Da Eun.