Quotes About Insight

I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it.... We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Common sense is the knack of seeing things as they are, and doing things as they ought to be done.

If you think along the lines of Nature then you think properly." from the video "Carl Jung speaks about death

All great discoveries are made by men whose feelings run ahead of their thinking.

Leadership is about being better able to listen to the whole than anyone else can.

You cannot understand a system unless you change it.

No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.

Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.

High thoughts are profound.

Better a brain than a fist. A brain can hold anything, from giant things, like distant stars and planets, to tiny things we can't see, like germs. A brain can even hold things that aren't and never were, like hobbits. A brain can hold the whole universe, a fist just holds what little it can grab. Or hits what it can't.

With so many marvels around you, did you stop seeing some of them?

Forewarned is not forearmed. Sometimes you spend so much effort looking for the track that you know is there, that you miss the other one that you didn't know about.

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.

If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool

Whatever we look at, and however we look at it, we see only through our own eyes.

Intuition (is) perception via the unconscious

We often dream about people from whom we receive a letter by the next post. I have ascertained on several occasions that at the moment when the dream occurred the letter was already lying in the post-office of the addressee.

Man, as we realize if we reflect for a moment, never perceives anything fully or comprehends anything completely.

I feel it is the duty of one who goes his own way to inform society of what he finds on his voyage of discovery.

I early arrived at the insight that when no answer comes from within to the problems and complexities of life, they ultimately mean very little. Outward circumstances are no substitute for inner experience.

the paradox is one of our most valued spiritual possessions...

As understanding deepens, the further removed it becomes from knowledge.

If I want to understand an individual human being, I must lay aside all scientific knowledge of the average man and discard all theories in order to adopt a completely new and unprejudiced attitude. I can only approach the task of understanding with a free and open mind, whereas knowledge of man, or insight into human character, presupposes all sorts of knowledge about mankind in general.

Indeed, I do not forget that my voice is but one voice, my experience a mere drop in the sea, my knowledge no greater than the visual field in a microscope, my mind's eye a mirror that reflects a small corner of the world, and my ideas--a subjective confession.