Quotes About Insight

Films and television let us experience other lives vicariously, or perhaps voyeuristically, as we watch those lives play out. But in a novel, we can become those characters, we can identify from the inside with someone whose life is radically different from our own. Best of all, when it's over … we get to be ourselves again, changed slightly or profoundly by the experience, possessed of new insights perhaps, but recognizably us once more.

Part of pattern recognition is talent, but a whole lot of it is practice: if you read enough and give what you read enough thought, you begin to see patterns, archetypes, recurrences.

That's what happens when works get reenvisioned: we learn something about the age that produced the original as well as about our own.

The question always is, what does misfortune really tell us?

The amazing thing about books is how they have lives of their own.

The real reason for a quest is always self-knowledge.

The worldview of a people, though normally left unspoken in the daily business of buying and selling and counting shekels, is to be found in a culture's stories, myths, and rituals, which, if studied aright, inevitably yield insight into the deepest concerns of a people by unveiling the invisible fears and desires inscribed on human hearts.

Do not hope to understand the source of my understanding.

People are often unaware of their own unawareness

We learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

Backlock, a poet blind from his birth, could describe visual objects with accuracy; Professor Sanderson, who was also blind, gave excellent lectures on color, and taught others the theory of ideas which they had and he had not. In the social sphere these gifted ones are mostly women; they can watch a world which they never saw, and estimate forces of which they have only heard. We call it intuition.

By experience, says Roger Ascham, we find out a short way by a long wandering. Not seldom that long wandering unfits us for further travel, and of what use is our experience to us then?

But you will never realize that an incident which filled but a degree in the circle of your thoughts covered the whole circumference of mine. No person can see exactly what and where another's horizon is.

People who have always gone right don't know half as much about the nature and ways of going right as those do who have gone wrong.

Ah, dear Jude; that's because you are like a totally deaf man observing people listening to music. You say 'What are they regarding? Nothing is there.' But something is.

I don't want to see landscapes, i.e. scenic paintings of them, because I don't want to see the original realities – as optical effects that is. I want to see the deeper reality underlying the scenic, the expression of what are sometimes called abstract imaginings. The 'simply natural' is interesting no longer.

We discern a grand force in the lover which he lacks while a free man, but there is a breadth of vision in the free man which in the lover we vainly seek.

The thought of Pascal's was brought home to him: "A mesure qu'on a plus d'esprit, on trouve qu'il y a plus d'hommes originaux. Les gens du commun ne trouvent pas de différence entre les hommes.

Perhaps, as with many men, their opportunities of observation were not so good as their opportunities of expression.

I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to you: yea, who knoweth not such things as these?—Job xii. 3.

Their eyes having met, became, as it were, mutually locked together, ... a clear penetrating ray of intelligence had shot from each into each, giving birth to ..., the conviction

Love begins with a sense of superior discernment.

We discern a grand force in the lover which he lacks whilst a free man, but there is a breadth of vision in the free man which in the lover we vainly seek.

By experience, says Roger Ascham, we find out a short way by a long wandering.