Quotes About Clarity

Honesty set you free,

It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or do in a circumstance unexpected by other people: it is reflection, it is meditation.

Un croquis vaut mieux quun long discours.Fr., A picture is worth a thousand words.

A good sketch is better than a long speech.

There is one quality that one must possess to win, and that is definiteness of purpose, the knowledge of what one wants and a burning desire to possess it.

We refuse to believe that which we don't understand.

If you have more than one reason to do something (choose a doctor or veterinarian, hire a gardener or an employee, marry a person, go on a trip), just don't do it. It does not mean that one reason is better than two, just that by invoking more than one reason you are trying to convince yourself to do something. Obvious decisions (robust to error) require no more than a single reason.

Things always become obvious after the fact

E quando si vedono le cose future con tanta chiarezza, come già stessero succedendo, allora è segno che non devono succedere mai. Perchè son già successe, in un certo senso, nella nostra testa, e non è più consentito di provarle davvero.

poems are small moments of enlightenment

The aim is to burn through to first thoughts, to the place where energy is unobstructed by social politeness or the internal censor, to the place where you are writing what you mind actually sees and feels, not what it thinks it should see or feel.

Once you connect with your mind, you are who you are and you're free.

Entire wars have been based on our inability to see.

Naked Lunch, after the novel by William Burroughs—"a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.

Our ideas and intentions can mask and cover up a story; there is a life force that will declare itself if you let it. Get out of the way.

Writing is the act of discovery.

Over the years, I have come to understand a critical difference between the world of fear and the world of freedom. In the former, the primary challenge is finding the strength to confront evil. In the latter, the primary challenge is finding the moral clarity to see evil.

A lack of moral clarity is why an Israeli journalist compared a kipa to a prison. It is why people in free societies cannot distinguish between religious fundamentalists in democratic states and religious terrorists in fundamentalist states. It is why people in free societies can come to see their fellow citizens as their enemies and foreign dictators as their friends.

We're not that much smarter than we used to be, even though we have much more information - and that means the real skill now is learning how to pick out the useful information from all this noise.

The information. It's out there, Rebbe. This part is not a sin.

Character displays "the weighty impatience of having to explain something that should already be understood.

Exactness of intention produces elegance of style.

Whenever I meet in Laplace with the words 'Thus it plainly appears', I am sure that hours and perhaps days, of hard study will alone enable me to discover how it plainly appears.

Just definitions either prevent or put an end to a dispute.