Quotes About Insight

One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living.

After a night's sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast. Pray tell me anything new that has happened to a man anywhere on this globe—and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River; never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave of this world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself.

I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.

The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.

What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge.

Throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us.

With respect to wit, I learned that there was not much difference between the half and the whole.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!

Many an object is not seen, though it falls within the range of our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our intellectual ray, i.e., we are not looking for it. So, in the largest sense, we find only the world we look for.

What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.

Not all books are as dull as their readers. –

How little that occurs to us in any way are we prepared at once to appreciate! We discriminate at first only a few features, and we need to reconsider our experience from many points of view and in various moods, to preserve the whole fruit of it.

What we will call beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for what is most of our boated so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance?

We shall see but little if we require to understand what we see. How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding! How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile!

There is no more Herculean task than to think a thought about this life and then get it expressed.

Nov. 2, 1837. Truth strikes us from behind, and in the dark, as well as from before and in broad daylight.

It's not what you look at that matters, its what you see

A man, any man, will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured us of...

be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.

I found my account in climbing a tree once. It was a tall white pine, on the top of a hill; and though I got well pitched, I was well paid for it, for I discovered new mountains in the horizon which I had never seen before—so much more of the earth and the heavens. I might have walked about the foot of the tree for threescore years and ten, and yet I certainly should never have seen them.

It is only when we forget our learning, do we begin to know.

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

A man is not his hope, nor his despair, nor yet his past deed. We know not yet what we have done, still less what we are doing. Wait till evening, and other parts of our day's work will shine than we had thought at noon, and we shall discover the real purport of our toil. As when the farmer has reached the end of the furrow and looks back, he can tell best where the pressed earth shines most.

The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We