Quotes About Insight

Silence is the beginning of wisdom.

Prudens quæstio dimidium scientiæ—to know what to ask is already to know half.

In books "we converse with the wise, as in action with fools." That is, if we know how to select our books. "Some books are to be tasted," reads a famous passage, "others to be swallowed, and some to be chewed and digested"; all these groups forming, no doubt, an infinitesimal portion of the oceans and cataracts of ink in which the world is daily bathed and poisoned and drowned.

There is no humorist like history.

We are like a man who goes round a castle seeking in vain for an entrance, and sometimes sketching the facades. If we can ferret out the ultimate nature of our own minds we shall perhaps have the key to the external world. 

This direct perception, this simple and steady looking-upon a thing, is intuition; not any mystic process, but the most direct examination possible to the human mind.

To his alert mind and ears, every experience was education.

For as no perfect view of a country can be taken from a flat; so it is impossible to discover the remote and deep parts of any science by standing upon the level of the same science, or without ascending to a higher.

He had the philosopher's disease of seeing so far ahead that all the little pleasant shapes and colors of existence passed under his nose unseen.

In philosophy all truth is old and only error is original.

Seek ye first the good things of the mind," Bacon admonishes us, "and the rest will either be supplied or its loss will not be felt."2 Truth will not make us rich, but it will make us free.

A bit of wisdom is a joy forever.

One must pay a penalty for having a prejudice against obscurity.

Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.

Do you know," asks Emerson, "the secret of the true scholar? In every man there is something wherein I may learn of him; and In that I am his pupil.

Kant is the last person in the world whom we should read on Kant.

All profound utterances have varied facets for diverse minds.

Leonardo called "the noblest pleasure, the joy of understanding.

La educacion es el progresivo descubrimiento de nuestra propia ignorancia.

One work of genius is worth a thousand commentaries.

Truth generally lies in the coördination of antagonistic opinions.

That whereby man differs from the lower animals is but small. Most people throw it away; only

Non ragionam di lor, ma guarda e passa15—"Let us think no more about them, but look once and pass on.

The gift of story is wisdom