Quotes About Insight

philosophy is "the love of wisdom.

We shall then, for the first time, see everyone as he really was. There will be surprises.4

You have to be able to see things from the user's point of view.

looking at things from other people's point of view is practically the secret of success.

Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists. Your mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source of. It works, but you don't know why.

In practice I think it's easier to see ugliness than to imagine beauty.

Great work tends to grow out of ideas that others have overlooked, and no idea is so overlooked as one that's unthinkable. Natural

How can you see the wave, when you're the water?

Everything's a data point.

We need a dream-world in order to discover the features of the real world we think we inhabit.

Mathematics] is security. Certainty. Truth. Beauty. Insight. Structure. Architecture. I see mathematics, the part of human knowledge that I call mathematics, as one thing—one great, glorious thing. Whether it is differential topology, or functional analysis, or homological algebra, it is all one thing. ... They are intimately interconnected, they are all facets of the same thing. That interconnection, that architecture, is secure truth and is beauty. That's what mathematics is to me.

I was determined to think about nothing, which never works, because a blank mind is an invitation to truth.

A person's bathroom, I believe, is the only three-dimensional expression of their soul.

What a lot you know.' I laughed and said it was one of the few advantages of old age, to be a repository of bits and pieces of casual information that sometimes come in useful. But she said she didn't really mean that, she meant know as distinct from remember.

I had that sensation which sometimes comes to us all, of returning to a situation that had already been resolved on some previous occasion, of being again committed to a tragic course of action, having learned nothing from that other time or those other times

Fiction gives us the second chance that life denies us.

It seems to me that there is always something luminous in the face of a person in the act of reading.

Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us. -Paul Theroux, novelist (b. 1941)

Read to live better.

When something human is recorded, good travel writing happens.

If the Internet were everything it is cracked up to be, we would all stay at home and be brilliantly witty and insightful. Yet with so much contradictory information available, there is more reason to travel than ever before: to look closer, to dig deeper, to sort the authentic from the fake; to verify, to smell, to touch, to taste, to hear and sometimes - importantly - to suffer the effects of this curiosity.

The teachers," said one bus driver. "It's always the teachers," the other one said. I sighed, grumbled, kicked at roadside gravel, and slapped my head.

It is often the case that only when someone asks you very specific questions do you begin to think clearly about your intentions.

Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us