Quotes About Insight

A proverb is much matter decocted into a few words.

Travel makes a wise man better, and a fool worse.

The only knowledge perfectly acquired is the knowledge of our limitation.

Questioning a text is a creative, imaginative activity—something like brainstorming.

As dysfunctional as they may be on occasion, our theories, preconceptions, and "biases" are what make us smart.

The last best hope of life is that at some point during living it, all that you did wrong will suddenly teach you to do right.

Some truths hit harder than others.

She was a woman of extended silences, I noticed, and she said very little as we walked the streets of La Boca, looking at its brightly colored houses. It was as if she understood that quiet observation was the key to knowing a place, perhaps even the key to life.

their work was a way to understand the workings of the divine.

Fear is the mother of foresight.

Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks…

Being smart spoils a lot of things, doesn't it?

You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It's all there and you just have to find it.

To a clear eye the smallest fact is a window through which the infinite may be seen.

Prudence is but experience, which equal time, equally bestows on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto.

He that is to govern a whole Nation, must read in himselfe, not this, or that particular man; but Man-kind;

Apothegms form a short cut to much knowledge.

One of the major insights of Zen is that the world should be perceived directly, not as an array of embodied names.

Only in formal meditation can there be the real beginning of understanding.

the only way to really understand the message is to stop trying to "understand" it.

That end is an intuitive realization of a single great insight—that we and the world around are one, both part of a larger encompassing absolute. Our rational intellect merely obscures this truth, and consequently we must shut it off, if only for a moment. Rationality constrains our mind; intuition releases it.

Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.

The astonishment soon passed off, the scales seemed to drop from his eyes, and the book became at once and for ever to him the great human and divine book, and the men and women, whom he had looked upon as something quite different from himself, became his friends and counsellors.

Science is simply common sense at its best.