Quotes About Insight

If professional religious leaders cannot instruct us in mythological lore, our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged role.

A myth, therefore, is true because it is effective, not because it gives us factual information. If, however, it does not give us new insight into the deeper meaning of life, it has failed.

Anybody who imagines that revealed religion requires a craven clinging to a fixed, unalterable, and self-evident truth should read the rabbis. Midrash required them to "investigate" and "go in search" of fresh insight. The rabbis used the old scriptures not to retreat into the past but to propel them into the uncertainties of the post-temple world.

Oedipus had to abandon his certainty, his clarity, and supposed insight in order to become aware of the dark ambiguity of the human condition.

novel, like a myth, teaches us to see the world differently; it shows us how to look into our own hearts and to see our world from a perspective that goes beyond our own self-interest. If

As one Rabbi put it, "God does not come to man oppressively but commensurately with a man's power of receiving him."82 This very important rabbinic insight meant that God could not be described in a formula as though he were the same for everybody: he was an essentially subjective experience. Each individual would experience the reality of "God" in a different way to answer the needs of his or her own particular temperament.

The personal God reflects an important religious insight: that no supreme value can be less than human.

A veil was, as it were, suddenly stripped away from a reality that had been there all the time, but which we had not seen before.

One of the many great sources of happiness is to get a glimpse, here and there, of a new aspect of the incredible world we live in and of our incredible role in it."17

Instead of engaging in uncharitable controversies, in which everybody insisted that he alone was right, a humble acknowledgement of our lack of insight should draw us together.

Si te consideras sabio, aseguraban, ¡puedes dar prácticamente por seguro que no lo eres!

we may need to find a way of posing Socratic questions that lead to personal insight rather than simply repeating the facts as we see them yet again. We

true insight does not consist of the acquisition of information but comes from mastering our egotism and greed.5

If there's one thing you taught me, it's to never trust an answer that's actually another question.

You learn a lot about a person by the way he plays cards. Then it was a good thing no one had seen her play.

I am the daughter of a psychologist. I know that the thing ostensibly being studied is rarely the thing being studied. (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, p. 99)

Maybe anosognosia, the inability to see your own disability, is the human condition and I'm the only one who doesn't suffer from it.

Reading Austen is a frickin' mine field.

My education, my father liked to point out, was wider than it was deep.

Sometimes the most worthwhile things are right in front of our eyes. We just make them hard because we think that gives them more value.

Humans have a wonderful saying for everything and then proceed to ignore the wisdom in all of them.

Don't sweat the petty things and don't pet the sweaty things.

You could only ever see a thing when you were standing outside of it.

My point is that you see these people in a way that I will never see them. Your experiences are no longer my experiences. I can't guide you any longer because I don't know where you're going.