Quotes About Insight

Autobiography is an unrivalled vehicle for telling the truth about other people.

What makes me want to keep reading a nonfiction text is the encounter with a surprising, well-stocked mind as it takes on the challenge of the next sentence, paragraph

It is while you are patiently toiling at the little tasks of life that the meaning and shape of the great whole of life dawn on you.

The true way to be humble is not to stoop until you are smaller than yourself, but to stand at your real height against some higher nature that will show you what the real smallness of your greatness is.

Just the way a dream is a message from your unconscious, a myth is a cultural dream. Decipher the symbols and the meaning of a dream and we understand ourselves better. It's the same with a myth—understanding it gives us insight into a deeper level of our humanity that we all share.

The reason the pro tells you to keep your head down is so you can't see him laughing.

You don't go after poetry, you take what comes. Maybe the gods do it through me but I certainly do a hell of a lot of the work.

Gossip isn't scandal and it's not merely malicious. It's chatter about the human race by lovers of the same. Gossip is the tool of the poet, the shop-talk of the scientist, and the consolation of the housewife, wit, tycoon and intellectual. It begins in the nursery and ends when speech is past.

It's what they say to do when you're depressed, you know. Walk in someone else's shoes for a while, and your own won't feel so tight.

Every reading is a misreading.

Writing is… a descent into the self.

Mistakes are the usual bridge between inexperience and wisdom.

L'homme ne s'avise de la réalité que quand il l'a représentée. Et rien, jamais, n'a pu mieux la représenter que le théâtre.

A comedian is someone who tells the truth. Truth is the set of all jokes told by all comedians in the world.

It is only by maintaining a reasonable distance from the book that we may be able to appreciate its true meaning.

What we are able to say about our intimate relation with a book will have more force if we have not thought about it excessively. Instead, we need only let our unconscious express itself within us and give voice, in this privileged moment of openness in language, to the secret ties that bind us to the book, and therefore to ourselves.

There is not less wit nor less invention in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book, than in being the first author of that thought.

Speaking, when you have something to say, is like looking. But who looks? If people could see properly, and see whole, they would all be painters. And it's because people have no idea how to look that they hardly ever understand.

The precision of naming takes away from the uniqueness of seeing.

O pedante compreende sem sentimento profundo, enquanto o mundano usufrui sem compreender.

The most excellent and divine counsel, the best and most profitable advertisement of all others, but the least practiced, is to study and learn how to know ourselves. This is the foundation of wisdom and the highway to whatever is good.

The most excellent and divine counsel, the best and most profitable advertisement of all others, but the least practised, is to study and learn how to know ourselves. This is the foundation of wisdom and the highway to whatever is good. . . . God, Nature, the wise, the world, preach man, exhort him both by word and deed to the study of himself.

Et peut-être la posterité me saura gré de lui avoir fait connaître que les Anciens n'ont pas tout su. ( And perhaps, posterity will thank me for having shown that the ancients did not know everything .)

People are used to seeing natural history programmes that have been filmed over many years which are concentrated, focused visions of natural history.