Time & Perspective Quote by Shimon Peres

A life in politics is usually retrofitted into tidy origin stories: the young prodigy, the early calling, the straight line to leadership. Peres gives you something stranger and more revealing. "I was a good student, because I jumped over a school" is a deliberately skewed credential, a wink at the idea that learning is bigger than institutions. It carries the immigrant subtext too: the sense of being propelled by circumstance, not by a polished system that gently shepherds you forward. If you had to skip steps, you learn to make steps.

The inventory that follows - history, literature, basketball, swimming - reads almost comically ordinary for a man who spent decades in the furnace of Israeli statecraft. That ordinariness is the point. Peres is sanding down the myth of the great man and replacing it with a portrait of someone shaped by books, bodies, and daily life. History and literature hint at the twin lenses he brought to politics: an obsession with narrative (how nations justify themselves) and with time (how choices echo).

Then the disarming final line: "I was so happy". Coming from a leader associated with war, diplomacy, and existential stakes, happiness lands as both nostalgia and argument. It suggests a private reservoir - the belief that even in a project as severe as nation-building, the fuel is not only fear or grievance but a remembered joy, a confidence that life can be more than survival.