Quotes About Insight

We are so bemused by our own petard, that we are unable to look at things objectively.

The more I learned the more I realized how very much one has to know before one is in-the-know at all.

Everything has its way of speaking and telling things worth knowing. Even the little grass-blades have their way of saying things as plain as words when human lips let them fall...the choice bits of wisdom...were never written down in any books.

When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.

The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operating novelist to dispel the blur.

When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don't have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up.

Tragedies in hindsight look like farces.

Who was it said that the longer we live, the less we understand?

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on coloured canvas, reveals himself.

But if you're very clever, I think there's something that can unhinge you if you're not careful.

Film-makers and actors can only show a version of the act, but writers can express what people are thinking, feeling, as well as doing.

I think a great book—leaving aside other qualities such as narrative power, characterization, style, and so on—is a book that describes the world in a way that has not been done before; and that is recognized by those who read it as telling new truths—about society or the way in which emotional lives are led, or both—such truths having not been previously available, certainly not from official records or government documents, or from journalism or television.

the littleness of life that art exaggerates"?

But if you're very clever, I think there's something that can unhinge you if you're not careful.

How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted?

To look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock.

Samo oni koji vide šta ?e se dogoditi prežive, mora da je to pravilo.

Ipak, ništa tako ne može da natera ljude da pametno misle kao dobra katastrofa.

The more you learn, the less you fear. 'Learn' not in the sense of academic study, but in the practical understanding of life.

finding another woman can bring an exceptional clarity of mind to a man all of a sudden.

But then, as she told herself, who would learn better than she that hindsight is a prism that alters everything?

The essential point here is that there are several stages of creative thought: first, a stage of preparation in which the problem is consciously worked over; then a period of incubation without any conscious concentration upon the problem; and then the illumination which is later justified by logic.

It was the brightest entry into darkness.

Good God. He doesn't know me at *all*. How crushing. How illuminating. How ... potentially very useful.