Quotes About Insight

On Ralph Waldo Emerson)I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more; and if he don't attain the bottom, why all the lead in Galena can't fashion the plummet that will. I'm not talking of Mr Emerson now -but of the whole corps of thought-divers, that have been diving and coming up again with bloodshot eyes since the world began.

He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad.

Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God.

The world is infinitely more complex than it appeared to me 15 years ago.

About 15 years ago I went though a period of a year or so when I just couldn't find anything good. My wife noticed I was having trouble reading menus. I bought some cheap reading glasses in a drug store. I got home and suddenly all these books that weren't good were good.

I was aware that the teaching of drawing was being stopped almost 30 years ago. And I always said, 'The teaching of drawing is the teaching of looking.' A lot of people don't look very hard.

As far as feeling freedom in my career now versus five years ago... I think if I feel any more free it's simply because of the experiences that I've had, and the wisdom I've accumulated from that time.

You're living with these characters for years and years, you need to have a lock on who they are as people, what they like, what they don't like, what they experience, and what they go through.

I denied this for many, many years and years... but you cannot help but not see a little of my mother in the character of Edna.

Yes, but with the Cube there are many flashes, there are many aha's.

At my first library job, I worked with a woman named Sheila Brownstein, who was The Reader's Advisor. She was a short, bosomy Englishwoman who accosted people at the shelves and asked if they wanted advice on what to read, and if the answer was yes, she asked what writers they already loved and then suggested somebody new.

To clarify the facts to everyone, yes, I did have a heart attack. I was on a plane leaving from Los Angeles, CA, heading to Secaucus, NJ, for a comic convention when I started to feel some discomfort in my chest.

I had enough therapy to know when I broke it down, it became clearer to me: Yes, comedy was kind of a cleansing thing for me to do.

Some people say that you should read people who think completely differently from you so that everything you read and everything that they say is a challenge to you but there's something to be said for reading people where you think, 'Yes, that's how I would have said it if I could have found the words for it'.

If you realize you aren't so wise today as you thought you were yesterday, you're wiser today.

I had been told from school onwards that the best definition of a human being was man the tool-maker - yet I had just watched a chimp tool-maker in action. I remember that day as vividly as if it was yesterday.

I was at first but I mean I thought at first that I wanted a little bit of that in there but the reasoning behind what they cut and what they kept really makes sense and it really played for me when I saw it yesterday, it all worked and was understood.

Many entrepreneurs do not realize that many of the problems their businesses face today began yesterday, long before there was a business.

The logic of words should yield to the logic of realities.

In my mind, declaring that an unfamiliar task will yield low-hanging fruit is almost always an admission that you have little insight about what you're setting out to do.

No amounts of stone and bone could yield the kinds of information that the paintings gave so freely.

Plays, especially great plays, yield their secrets over a long period of time. You can't read it three times and say, 'OK, I got it. I know what's happening.'

Observing humans and observing oneself yields a clear-minded starting point for literature.

Everybody has a world, and that world is completely hidden until we begin to inquire. As soon as we do, that entire world opens to us and yields itself. And you see how full and complex it is.