Quotes About Insight

We younger ones began to see that we knew things that never had not been known.

White people who wished to think well of themselves did not use the language of racial insult in front of black people. But the problem for us white people, as we finally had to understand, was that we could not be selectively complicit. To be complicit at all, even thoughtlessly by custom, was to be complicit in the whole extent and reach of the injustice. It is hard for customary indifference to utstick itself from the abominations to which it tacitly consents.

These and other things seem clear when they are off on the outer verges of my mind, but then, when I try to see them straight, they grow misty and fade away under the burden of questions.

I suppose if I had to give a one-word answer to the question of why I read, that word would be pleasure. The kind of pleasure you can get from reading is like no other in the world.

Satyr," he says, "is a sort of Glass, wherein Beholders do generally discover every body's Face but their Own; which is the chief Reason for that kind Reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.

They say the eyes are the window to the soul.

Sometimes the best things look the strangest.

Only a few know, how much one must know, to know how little one knows

You should look straight at a film; that's the only way to see one. Film is not the art of scholars but of illiterates.

Most details are factually correct; some are not. What was important to the author was something other than accuracy, some essence he thought he glimpsed when he encountered the protagonist of this story.

Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word 'understanding.

proof. It will come in its own time and in its own way. What I can do is describe how I have learned to use it

they want to join us and live in conscious contact with us. They need us, but more, we need them—their wisdom and their devastatingly accurate insight into the fragile truth of the world.

All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.

Paradox is a characteristic of truth.

When a woman wants me to do anything (my daughter, or not, it doesn't matter), I always insist on knowing why. The oftener you make them rummage their own minds for a reason, the more manageable you will find them in all the relations of life. It isn't their fault (poor wretches!) that they act first and think afterwards; it's the fault of the fools who humour them.

?nsan?n yapabilece?i itiraflar?n en ac?kl?s?, kendi sersemli?inin itiraf?ndan ba?kas? de?ildir.

I should have looked into my own heart, and found this new growth springing up there, and plucked it out while it was young.

tenait, une vive clarté rejaillissait sur ses

History is an excellent teacher with few pupils.

Facts replaced understanding; and knowledge, split into a thousand isolated fragments, no longer generated wisdom.

A sense of humor, being born of perspective, bears a near kinship to philosophy; each is the soul of the other.

Crafty men condemn studies, simple men admire them, and wise men use them; for they teach not their own use; but that is a wisdom without them, and above them, won by observation.

By imagination and reason we turn experience into foresight; we become the creators of our future, and cease to be the slaves of our past.