Quotes: Point of View (1)

Point of view 860 "Men pass before me like shadows on the wall—their actions, passions, feelings, are flickerings of the light—and then they vanish." Hawthorne: "The Christmas Banquet" People pass through life like shadows on the wall.

Point of view 864 "There was a modern philanthropist, who had become so deeply sensible of the calamities of thousands and millions of his fellow creatures and of the impracticableness of any general measures for their relief, that he had no heart to do what little good lay immediately within his power, but contented himself with being miserable for sympathy." Hawthorne: "The Christmas Banquet" There is so much misery in the world that we feel we can do nothing to alleviate it and we settle for feeling miserable and sympathetic.

Point of view 59 "To others we are not ourselves but a performer in their lives cast for a part we do not know that we are playing." Elizabeth Bibesco. 1951. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms. To others we are like members of a cast of actors in a part we do not know we are playing.

Point of view 59 "We lack the sense of our own visibility...imagining as quite close to us the interested attention of people who on the contrary never give us a thought, and not suspecting that we are at the same moment the sole preoccupation of others." Marcel Proust. 1921-2. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms. We don't know who is out there watching us.

Point of view 59 "A man cannot look in the mirror at his own image with the eyes of a stranger...." Schopenhauer. 1851. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms. We cannot look objectively at ourselves in a mirror.