Quotes About Insight

She might, in one of her phases, have been a prophetess

The past is but a coarse and sensual prophecy of the present and the future.

It appears to me, said the daguerreotypist, smiling, that Uncle Venner has the principles of Fourier at the bottom of his wisdom; only they have not quite so much distinctness in his mind as in that of the systematizing Frenchman.

Yet those same bleared optics had a strange, penetrating power, when it was their owner's purpose to read the human soul.

the boy's tender and confiding simplicity discerned what other people could not see; and thus the love, which was meant for all, became his peculiar portion.

He deemed it essential, it would seem, to know the man, before attempting to do him good.

He was too calm and cool an observer. Phoebe felt his eye, often; his heart, seldom or never.

man's bewilderment is the measure of his wisdom.

The most powerful minds are not always the best acquainted with their own feelings.

How do you judge the brightness of a light when you're the source? A spotlight can never see the shadows it casts.

There are many ways in which the check brain light illuminates, but here's the screwed-up part: the driver can't see it. It's like the light is positioned in the backseat cup holder, beneath an empty can of soda that's been there for a month. No one sees it but the passengers—and only if they're really looking for it, or when the light gets so bright and so hot that it melts the can, and sets the whole car on fire.

Funny how you don't realize what's missing until you've found it.

What we perceive as art, the universe perceives as directions.

It's amazing how people can surprise you.

That's wisdom you can take to the grave, and dig up when you need it!

It wasn't just that he didn't see the big picture, sometimes he saw a different picture entirely.

I won't tell you what to look for, because if I do, you'll miss the things you would intuitively find.

I believed, in my arrogance, that I had a keen grasp of the big picture that others lacked. But of course, I was just as limited as anyone else. When I gleaned the president and his cabinet, it shook the world – but the world was already shaking just fine without me.

I don't forgive him-I merely understand him.

The Fatigues all talk like that. Big-Picture-speak, Risa calls it. Seeing the whole, and none of the parts. It's not just in their speech but in their eyes as well. When they look at Risa, she can tell they don't really see her. They seem to see the mob of Unwinds more as a concept rather than a collection of anxious kids, and so they miss all the subtle social tremors that shake things just as powerfully as the jets shake the roof.

We can't create what we don't understand, so until we understand what life is, how can we ever create it?

We are forever impaled upon our own wisdom.

Epiphanies are never convenient, and often arrive too late.

Never ask how. At that moment, it felt like the wisest advice I had ever gotten.