Quotes About Insight

You see, it's not enough to know what the future is. You have to know what it means.

But most of all in the last couple of years I have been listening. As a journalist, I learned to listen. It is amazing how much people will tell you if you listen in the right way. Rob, my PA, says that I can listen like a vacuum cleaner. Always beware of somebody who is a really good listener.

Sometimes people fools themselves into believing things that aren't true. Sometimes that can be quite dangerous for the person. They see the world in a wrong way. They won't let themselves see that what they believe is wrong. But often there is a part of the mind that does know, and the right words can let it out.

His job was to make sense of the world and there were times that he wished the world would meet him halfway.

Reality so often fails when it comes to small, satisfying details, she thought.

Thus proving that books can teach you much, if only to give you a good name for a devilish, smart goat.

Sufficiently close examination changes the thing being observed.

In fact, it really wasn't her problem. How nice to find a problem that wasn't yours.

You humans are so good at ignoring things. You are almost blind and almost deaf. You look at a tree and see…just a tree, a stiff weed. You don't see its history, feel the pumping of the sap, hear every insect in the bark, sense the chemistry of the leaves, notice the hundred shades of green, the tiny movements to follow the sun, the subtle growth of wood...

Anyone with half a mind could see that, said Tiffany. Miss Tick sighed. Yes. But sometimes it's so hard to find half a mind when you need one.

Listen very carefully... listen to everyone and don't say much and think about what they say and how they say it and watch their eyes... it becomes like a big jigsaw, but you're the only one who can see all the pieces. You'll know what they want you to know, and what they don't want you to know, and even what they think no one knows.

But smart has to have a depth as well as a length. Some smart brushes over a problem. And some smart grinds exceeding slow, like the mills of God, and it grinds fine, and when it comes up with an answer, it has been tested.

For example, it is said that someone at a party once asked the famous philosopher Ly Tin Weedle "Why are you here?" and the reply took three years.

The truth shall make thee fret

This was the time, when night wasn't quite over but day hadn't quite begun, when thoughts stood out bright and clear and without disguise.

He was stupid, yes, in the particular way that very clever people can be stupid.

They both savoured the strange warm glow of being much more ignorant than ordinary people, who were ignorant of only ordinary things.

the damned had been given that insight which makes hardship so easy to bear — the absolute and certain knowledge that things could be worse.

Granny Aching had never been at home with words. She collected silence like other people collected string. But she had a way of saying nothing that said it all.

Child, you've come here to learn what's true and what's not, but there's little I can teach you that you don't already know. You just don't know you know it, and you'll spend the rest of your life learning what's already in your bones. And that's the truth.

Contrary to popular belief, fantasy is not about making things up. The world is stuffed full of things. It is almost impossible to invent any more. No, the role of fantasy as defined by G. K. Chesterton is to take what is normal and everyday and usual and unregarded, and turn it around and show it to the audience from a different direction, so that they look at it once again with new eyes.

She managed to come up with the kind of predictions that you can only understand after the thing has happened, said Anathema. Like 'Do Notte Buye Betamacks.' That was a prediction for 1972.

Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.

The difference between fear and awe is a matter of our eyes adjusting.