Quotes About Insight

Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors.

I've written some poetry I don't understand myself.

The extra clutter adds no important insight; instead, it offers more clutter in which erros can lurk.

Yank grunted. "That sums it up.

The world is an empty place if we keep our minds shut! But eyes wide open and the world explodes with wonderment completely at our figertips!

Il mondo è un bel libro, ma poco serve a chi non lo sa leggere.

The world is a beautiful book, but of little use to him who cannot read it.

Ever since we discovered that Earth is round and turns like a mad spinning-top, we have understood that reality is not as it appears to us.

The ability to understand something before it's observed is at the heart of scientific thinking.

Science is about reading the world from a gradually widening point of view.

we have realized that it is our immediate intuitions that are imprecise:

Perhaps it is we who have not yet learned to look at it from just the right point of view, one that would reveal its hidden simplicity.

That which seems intuitive to us now is the result of scientific and philosophical elaborations in the past.

In un caso e nell'altro, il premio è la bellezza, e occhi nuovi per vedere il mondo.

La capacidad de comprender antes de ver constituye el corazón del pensamiento científico.

Perhaps on closer inspection it is not the [Standard Model] that lacks elegance. Perhaps it is we who have not yet learned to look at it from just the right point of view, one that would reveal its hidden simplicity.

Myths nourish science, and science nourishes myth. But the value of knowledge remains.

Our intuitions have developed on the basis of our limited experience.

Looking at the sun going down, the eyes of Copernicus had seen the world turning. Looking at a glass of still water, the eyes of Boltzmann saw atoms and molecules frenziedly moving.

Science begins with a vision.

We suddenly remember that it's not the sun that's moving, but the Earth that's spinning and we see with the unhinged eye of the mind our entire planet, and ourselves with it, rotating backwards, away from the sun. We are seeing with "mad eyes" like those of Paul McCartney's Fool on the Hill. The crazed vision that sometimes sees further than our blurry customary eyesight.

Physics opens windows through which we see far into the distance. What we see does not cease to astound us. We realize that we are full of prejudices and that our intuitive image of the world is partial, parochial, inadequate

It is characteristic of genius to be aware of the limitations of its own findings

Our culture is foolish to keep science and poetry separated: they are two tools to open our eyes to the complexity and beauty of the world.