He would sit down and consider the situation carefully. Not only did this help to identify the solution to the problem, but it also gave him the opportunity to remind himself that things were not really as bad as they seemed; it was all a question of perspective. Sitting down and looking up at the sky for a few minutes--not at any particular part of the sky, but just at the sky in general--at the vast, dizzying, empty sky of Botswana, cut human problems down to size. Alexander McCall Smith
There are no facts, only interpretations.
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Friedrich Nietzsche
My story is of such marvel that if it were written with a needle on the corner of an eye, it would yet serve as a lesson to those who seek wisdom.
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Anonymous
There are 1, 198, 500, 000 people alive now in China. To get a feel for what that means, simply take yourself - in all your singularity, importance, complexity, and love - and multiply by 1, 198, 500, 000. See? Nothing to it.
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Annie Dillard
I really tried, or so I thought, to avoid lying, but it seemed to me that they forced it on me by the difference in their vision of things, so that I was always transposing reality for them into something they could understand.
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Mary McCarthy
When you tell the tale of how another person is from your perspective, you're making him or her into a character, a player in your own life story. This way of knowing does not bring you closer because it is really all about you.
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Kira Asatryan
More Quotes By Alexander McCall Smith
Regular maps have few surprises: their contour lines reveal where the Andes are, and are reasonably clear. More precious, though, are the unpublished maps we make ourselves, of our city, our place, our daily world, our life; those maps of our private world we use...
It was time to take the pumpkin out of the pot and eat it. In the final analysis, that was what solved these big problems of life. You could think and think and get nowhere, but you still had to eat your pumpkin. That brought...
Mma Ramotswe had listened to a World Service broadcast on her radio one day which had simply taken her breath away. It was about philosophers who called themselves existentialists and who, as far as Mma Ramotswe could ascertain, lived in France. These French people said...
There was a distinction between lying and telling half-truths, but it was a very narrow one.
She had argued for a broad interpretation, which imposed a duty to answer questions truthfully, and not to hide facts which could give a different complexion to a matter, but on subsequent thought she had revised her position. Although she still believed that one should...
