Quotes About Insight

people never change. What you think you see is what you see. See?

Your favorite virtue? An appreciation for irony.

A good conversation is the only human equivalent: the realizing that decent points are being made and understood, that irony is in play, and elaboration, and that a dull and obvious remark would be almost physically hurtful.

A point, like a joke, is a terrible thing to miss.

The measure of an education is that you acquire some idea of the extent of your ignorance.

Our near absolute dominion over nature has, however, confronted us with one brilliant and ironic and inescapable insight. The decryption of DNA is not only useful in putting a merciful but overdue end to theories of creationism and racism but also enlightening in instructing us that we are ourselves animals.

Wit, after all, is the unfailing symptom of intelligence.

he despised the alternative flow of information and insight, which was gossip and rumor. Like Winston Smith, he was first and foremost activated by a raging thirst to know: a thirst that could only be slaked by a personal quest for the least varnished version of the truth.

Take the risk of thinking for yourself, much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way.

Orwell was one of those upon whom nothing was lost. (This included, as Orwell himself said: "the power of facing unpleasant facts"). By declining to lie, even as far as possible to himself, and by his determination to seek elusive but verifiable truth, he showed how much can be accomplished by an individual who unites the qualities of intellectual honesty and moral courage..

Christopher Hitchens

The naive and simple are seldom as naive and simple as they seem, and this suspicion is reinforced by those who proclaim their own naïveté and simplicity.

Watching and listening up close, I saw nothing to suggest that if his brains were made of TNT they would generate enough explosive power to disarrange his hair.

Only those who are capable of silliness can be called truly intelligent.

there are some things you don't even know you know, until you're asked.

I am a camera with its shutter open

it's about experience. They keep telling you, when you're older, you'll have experience—and that's supposed to be so great. What would you say about that, sir? Is it really any use, would you say?

I have kept this diary doggedly, day by day, because I believe a continuous record, no matter how full of trivialities, will always gradually reveal something of the subconscious mind behind it. I've never regretted keeping a diary yet. There are always a few nuggets of literary value under all that sand.

It does appear, then, that what you find in the landscape of the Old Testament when you 'get there' very much depends on whom you take with you and through whose eyes you view it.

Christopher Moore

Paint only what you see,' his hero Millet had admonished. 'Imagination is a burden to a painter,' Auguste Renoir had told him. 'Painters are craftsmen, not storytellers. Paint what you see.' Ah, but what they hadn't said, hadn't warned him about, was how much you could see.

For it is written that if the wise man appears always stupid, his failures do not disappoint, and his success gives pleasant surprise.

Apologies, one loses perspective after spending a week in a brothel.

there comes a point where you'll find something out, where you'll see something, or where something will suddenly come together, and you'll realize that you know something that no one else in the world knows yet. Just you. No one else. You realize that all the value you have is in that one thing, and you're only going to have it for a short time until you tell someone else, but for that time you are more alive than you'll ever be.