Quotes About Insight

For the classics, philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure; for me, a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight.

Don't look for the precise and local. Simply; do not be narrow minded.

studying courage in textbooks doesn't make you any more courageous than eating cow meat makes you bovine.

It is often said that is wise he who can see things coming. Perhaps the wise one is the one who knows that he cannot see things far away.

Someone who did not find something is providing others with knowledge, the best knowledge, that of absence (what does not work)—yet he gets little or no credit for it.

One would suppose that people living through the beginning of WWII had an inkling that something momentous was taking place. Not at all.*

central problem is that birds rarely write more than ornithologists—Combining

for decades doctors never suspected that this "useless" tissue might actually have a use that escaped their detection. The

So we can learn a lot from data—but not as much as we expect. Sometimes a lot of data can be meaningless; at other times one single piece of information can be very meaningful. It

Learning from the Mistakes of Others

you are rewarded for perception, not results.

One day in the 1980s I had dinner with a famous speculator, a hugely successful man. He muttered the hyperbole that hit home: "much of what other people know isn't worth knowing.

Mother Nature knows more than he will ever know, not the other way around.

that is often associated with classroom knowledge that may get in the way of understanding what's going on in real life.

people often think that it will surely be the next batch of news that will really make a difference to their understanding of things.)

We do not spontaneously learn that we don't learn that we don't learn.

It struck me how lacking in imagination we are:

and unappreciated upon their discovery, and remained unappreciated well after their initial use.

It illustrates a severe limitation to our learning from observations or experience and the fragility of our knowledge.

If it were known and obvious, then someone next door would have already come up with the idea and it would have become generic.

they have what is lacking in the young:

It is often said that "is wise he who can see things coming." Perhaps the wise one is the one who knows that he cannot see things far away.

I have two ways of learning from history: from the past, by reading the elders; and from the future, thanks to my Monte Carlo toy.

their intuition getting in the way and blinding them.