Quotes About Insight

To read between the lines was easier than to follow the text

No,' she sadly insisted—'men don't know. They know in such matters almost nothing but what women show them.

the house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million, a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; every one of which has been pierced , or is still pierceable, in its vast front , by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will.

I might show it to you, but you'd never see it. The privilege isn't given to every one; it's not enviable. It has never been seen by a young, happy, innocent person like you. You must have suffered first, have suffered greatly, have gained some miserable knowledge. In that way your eyes are opened to it.

To her mind there was nothing of the infinite about Mrs. Penniman; Catherine saw her all at once, as it were, and was not dazzled by the apparition; whereas her father's great faculties seemed, as they stretched away, to lose themselves in a sort of luminous vagueness, which indicated, not that they stopped, but that Catherine's own mind ceased to follow them.

Try to be someone upon whom nothing is lost!

Yes, one has read; but this is beyond any book.

There's nothing so magnificent - for making others feel you - as to have no imagination.

It was as if, at moments, we were perpetually coming into sight of subjects before which we must stop short, turning suddenly out of alleys that we perceived to be blind, closing with a little bang that made us look at each other—for, like all bangs, it was something louder than we had intended—the doors we had indiscreetly opened.

The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business, in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement.

Mrs. Wix gave a sidelong look. She still had room for wonder at what Maisie knew.

She saw herself in this connexion without detachment – saw others alone with intensity; otherwise she might have been struck, fairly have been amused, by her free assignment of the pachydermatous quality. If

She was to feel henceforth as if she were flattening her nose upon the hard window-pane of the sweet-shop of knowledge

The chance had come - it was an extraordinary one - on the day she first met Densher; and it was to the girl's lasting honour that she knew on the spot what she was in the presence of.

Avete ragione che Millie non è facile a conoscere. Uno la vede, con intensità: la vede più di quanto non veda nessun altro; ma poi scopre che ciò non significa conoscerla, e che si può conoscere meglio una persona che non si riesca, diciamo, a vedere neppure appena la metà.

Because she has seen for herself. I've told her nothing. She's a person who does see.

She moved quickly indeed, and with reason, for a strange truth was filtering into her soul.

It had been her fortune to possess a finer mind than most of the persons among whom her lot was cast; to have a larger perception of surrounding facts and to care for knowledge that was tinged with the unfamiliar.

They had from an early hour made up their mind that society was, luckily, unintelligent, and the margin allowed them by this had fairly become one of their commonplaces.

Her eyes] had taken hold of him straightaway, measuring him up and down as if they knew how; as if he were human material they had already in some sort handled.

His mind contained several millions of facts, packed too closely together for the light breeze of the imagination to draw through the mass.

Don't you know ? How should I, my dear—in the absence of everything?

Whether or no he had a grand idea of the lucid, he held that nothing ever was in fact—for any one else—explained.

I just say this: that I think it's a great gain, early in life, to know the worst; then we don't live in a fool's paradise.