Quotes About Insight

The wise man waits and his enemies tear each other to pieces

This is the basic insight of the Gnostics, the one known to the great mystical thinkers of all traditions: the divine spark is within each human being.

Yet the greater the turmoil inside him, the more the revelations responded to it. It was as though the Quranic voice was able to see deep inside him and address questions he was barely aware he was asking.

But there are times, I would argue, when fiction delivers the greater truth.

Yes, I know, I'm only an artist. What would I know about the dark side of Baghdad?

Faulkner turned out to be a great teacher. When a student asked a question ineptly, he answered the question with what the student had really wanted to know.

It's funny to be a critic.

I think they call it EQ, emotional quotient. It's kind of like IQ, but it means you're able to sense shifts in

Truth has nutritional value.

It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.

If we were to put into practice what we know ... but that is the point.

The book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty -- and vice versa.

One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the quality of philosophy.

The old watch the young with anguish, pain, fear. Above all what each has learned is what things cost, what has to be paid.

You have to deduce a person's real feelings about a thing by a smile she does not know is on her face, by the way bitterness tightens muscles at a mouth's corner, or the way air is allowed to flow from the lungs.

But we do not reach truth unless we allow ourselves to be exposed to and drawn by a truth which is beyond our present understanding.

We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are.

Once set a strong mind thinking, and you have done all that it needs for its education.

The process of learning is a nonstop orgy of wonderment.

Being a hero, the man had observed, is largely a matter of knowing one's cues.

By now he had learned enough to know that when he was getting annoyed at somebody else, it was usually because there was something that he himself should be doing, and he wasn't doing it.

Historical seen, said Alice, people have almost always have whrong when they have said that.

You don't learn about yourself by being alone, you learn about yourself from other people.

That was one thing about books: once you read them they couldn't be unread. But