Prism Best Quotes

I SEE thee better in the dark, I do not need a light. The love of thee a prism be Excelling violet. I see thee better for the years That hunch themselves between, The miner’s lamp sufficient be To nullify the mine. And in the grave I see thee best— Its little panels be A-glow, all ruddy with the light I held so high for thee! What need of day to those whose dark Hath so surpassing sun, It seem it be continually At the meridian?

You can have the best message in the world, but the person on the receiving end will always understand it through the prism of his or her own emotions, preconceptions, prejudices, and preexisting beliefs. It's not enough to be correct or reasonable or even brilliant. The key to successful communication is to take the imaginative leap of stuffing yourself into your listener's shoes to know what they are thinking and feeling in the deepest recesses of their mind and heart. How that person perceives what you say is even more real, at least in a practical sense, than how you perceive yourself.

Your actions are viewed by observers through prisms shaped by their own interpretations, and sometimes misinterpretations. All you can do is strive to be your best self. Let the chips fall where they may.

Earth is both heaven and hell, a place where the best and worst experiences can be had, all contained within a singular bubble reality. You are rapidly approaching what we refer to as the Splitting Prism of Time.

As I traveled the country promoting my book, I was asked by many people, ‘What are you trying to prove here? Lyndon Johnson is dead. He can’t be prosecuted. What is the point of this other than an academic exercise?’ Here is the point: The government does not always tell us the truth. In fact, the government seldom tells us the truth. If ONE citizen understands by reading my book that everything the government says must be regarded with a healthy dose of skepticism, then I will have achieved my goal. Perhaps the best analysis comes from former federal prosecutor and US Attorney David Marston, who wrote to me, “You have viewed the JFK assassination through the prism of a murder investigator’s first question, cui bono (who benefits)? The shocking answer is that the primary suspect has been hiding in plain sight for fifty years: LBJ.

Charlotte is a prism for my life. Without her, my existence looks pale and bleak and somewhere near the middle of the suck-meter. But around her, I see clearly that my life isn’t made up of anything mediocre, but instead is some combination of the amazing and the dreadful— my brother who adores me, my parents who want what’s best for me, my brother who’s dying, my parents who won’t understand me. It’s not gray at all; it’s too painfully colorful and fantastic and awful for me to see without her help.

But psychology is passing into a less simple phase. Within a few years what one may call a microscopic psychology has arisen in Germany, carried on by experimental methods, asking of course every moment for introspective data, but eliminating their uncertainty by operating on a large scale and taking statistical means. This method taxes patience to the utmost, and could hardly have arisen in a country whose natives could be bored. Such Germans as Weber, Fechner, Vierordt, and Wundt obviously cannot ; and their success has brought into the field an array of younger experimental psychologists, bent on studying the elements of the mental life, dissecting them out from the gross results in which they are embedded, and as far as possible reducing them to quantitative scales. The simple and open method of attack having done what it can, the method of patience, starving out, and harassing to death is tried ; the Mind must submit to a regular siege, in which minute advantages gained night and day by the forces that hem her in must sum themselves up at last into her overthrow. There is little of the grand style about these new prism, pendulum, and chronograph-philosophers. They mean business, not chivalry. What generous divination, and that superiority in virtue which was thought by Cicero to give a man the best insight into nature, have failed to do, their spying and scraping, their deadly tenacity and almost diabolic cunning, will doubtless some day bring about. No general description of the methods of experimental psychology would be instructive to one unfamiliar with the instances of their application, so we will waste no words upon the attempt.

The very best thing about landing in that grave? Perspective. So I peer through this morning's prism: a science test looming in second period, an a-hole of a coach who probably could have used more childhood therapy than I got, and a tell-tale tampon under my foot. I consider the clawed tiger on the bed, the one wearing the zebra-printed sports bra - the same tiger that every Sunday transforms into the girl who voluntarily walks next door to help sort Miss Effie's medicine into her days-of-the-week pill container. The one who pretended her ankle hurt one day last week so the backup settler on her volleyball team would get to play on her birthday.

no one has a lock on all truth, that truth is too big to be encompassed by any single human mind, that at best we grasp only aspects of truth filtered through the prism of our individual experience, and that only God, who is Truth, knows and understands truth fully.

We are so used to considering everything through the prism of our current feelings and our most recent acquisitions that it is a radical change to consider the vast before. But if we would live well, it is necessary.

In early September, convinced that the best way to defend Richmond was to divert attention to Washington, Lee had decided to invade Maryland after obtaining Jefferson Davis’s permission. Today the decision to invade Maryland is remembered through the prism of Lee hoping to win a major battle in the North that would bring about European recognition of the Confederacy, potential intervention, and possible capitulation by the North, whose anti-war Democrats were picking up political momentum.

What's striking about the city as a construct is how it functions as a prism through which we contemplate our own identity and goals. The pubs or places of worship we spend time in reflect our own internal architecture and one person's lived experience of a city can wildly oppose the next's. This makes conversations about coorie in the city all the more interesting. Coorie streets full of bustle might not always be beautiful but there is always the potential to polish what is there. Life in a Scottish city can feel like a constant grapple between what's best for us and what we desire.

I feel that one of the reasons I enjoy having films that are historical or revisionist history or a period film is because I think it's one of the things that cinema can do best. It can do it [well] in two areas. One is that you can recreate the past in a movie and present it in a fictional way, because we know what it looked like. And the second reason is, by having time pass, you can examine the truth about something that happened in the past, because you've been able to look at it through the prism of time.

Lewis’s scant references to the horrors of trench warfare confirm both its objective realities (“the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, the landscape of sheer earth without a blade of grass”) and his own subjective distancing of himself from this experience (it “shows rarely and faintly in memory” and is “cut off from the rest of my experience”).[156] This is perhaps the most distinctive feature of Lewis’s “treaty with reality”—the construction of a frontier, a barrier, which protected Lewis from such shocking images as “horribly smashed men,” and allowed him to continue his life as if these horrors had been experienced by someone else. Lewis spun a cocoon around himself, insulating his thoughts from rotting corpses and the technology of destruction. The world could be kept at bay—and this was best done by reading, and allowing the words and thoughts of others to shield him from what was going on around him. Lewis’s experience of this most technological and impersonal of wars was filtered and tempered through a literary prism. For Lewis, books were both a link to the remembered—if sentimentally exaggerated—bliss of a lost past and a balm for the trauma and hopelessness of the present. As he wrote to Arthur Greeves several months later, he looked back wistfully to happier days, in which he sat surrounded by his “little library and browsed from book to book.”[157] Those days, he reflected with obvious sadness, were gone.

We encounter ideas through the prism of our own lived experience and because of this a good argument can be made that we best understand big ideas when they’re presented through the same personal prism.

Our perceptions of others are but fractured reflections, distorted by the prism of our connections with them.

don’t like to judge an administration’s overall significance on a moment-to-moment basis. That’s best viewed through the prism of history. Partially as a result, I’m neither a Democrat nor a Republican, but a registered Independent. I’ll be damned if I trust either side. As far as I’m concerned, too many lobbyists influence our politics, the positions taken by politicians and, ultimately, because the politicians are acting on behalf of powerful interests rather than acting and speaking as independent representatives answerable to the public, their very ability to conduct themselves with traditional decorum is affected. As a result, there’s no compromise, very little gets accomplished for the American people, and this country grows more and more divided every time there’s an election. And the cycle continues, and the situation only gets worse. I’ll let history be the judge of presidents in the grand sweep of things, but morality and statesmanship are day-to-day issues that I track closely. Is a president looking out for the best interests of the country or for himself? Do you present yourself publicly as president

The transition’s spreading disorder increasingly reflected not just organizational failures but Trump’s essential decision-making style. Charles Krauthammer, a sharp critic of his, told me he had been wrong earlier to characterize Trump’s behavior as that of an eleven-year-old boy. “I was off by ten years,” Krauthammer remarked. “He’s like a one-year-old. Everything is seen through the prism of whether it benefits Donald Trump.” That was certainly the way the personnel-selection process appeared from the outside. As one Republican strategist told me, the best way to become Secretary of State was to “try to be the last man standing.

When we select a candidate for any office we are not selecting a leader—in fact we are not looking at character traits at all—we are merely selecting a mirror, and the man who can best function in that reflective capacity is the victor. Unfortunately, since this requires the politician not only to try to "mirror" my desires, but also a thousand others, the one who wins is not simply a mirror, but a complex "prism" of sorts, attempting to "represent" a thousand wills at once. The last person he is actually allowed to be is himself. Needless to say, no authentic man—much less a great leader—would subject himself to such degradation. And yet we demand it of all politicians.

When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, what do you do? Whenever I’m feeling like I need to prioritize what I’m doing or overthinking a particular situation that is making me anxious, I try to remember this great exchange in the film Bridge of Spies. Tom Hanks, who plays a lawyer, asks his client, who is being accused of being a spy, “Aren’t you worried?” His answer: “Would it help?” I always think, “Would it help?” That is the pivotal question that I ask myself every day. If you put everything through that prism, it is a remarkably effective way to cut through the clutter.

We tend to see our lives from the prisms of others. That explains why we stop living and constantly race against our best interests. The ensuing frustration impacts negatively on us and others within our orbits. Life is as beautiful as the rose of contentment and as ugly as the thorn of inordinate ambition. Those who can think will thank. Those who thank live. Stop the rat race. Roll out the drums. Be thankful.