Quotes About Insight

Great men are not always wise.

Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom; and with all thy getting get understanding.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

The well of true wit is truth itself.

A brilliant epigram is a solemn platitude gone to a masquerade ball.

Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.

A word to the wise is sufficient.

I have always suspected that correctness is the last refuge of those who have nothing to say.

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

Half the world does not know how the other half lives.

This was the penn'worth of his thought.

No man better knows what good is than he who has endured evil.

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.

In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.

It is a sobering thought that each of us gives his hearers and his readers a chance to look into the inner working of his mind when he speaks or writes.

When you're a writer, you no longer see things with the freshness of the normal person. There are always two figures that work inside you, and if you are at all intelligent you realize that you have lost something. But I think there has always been this dichotomy in a real writer. He wants to be terribly human, and he responds emotionally, but at the same time there's this cold observer who cannot cry.

It is only through fiction and the dimension of the imaginary that we can learn something real about individual experience. Any other approach is bound to be general and abstract.

There are two kinds of writers - the great ones who can give you truths, and the lesser ones, who can only give you themselves.

It has been said that writing comes more easily if you have something to say.

How can I know what I think till I see what I say?

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.

Young men think old men fools and old men know young men to be so.

...perhaps at the end the little things may teach us most.