Quotes About Insight

I'm hungry, Garion, and I don't think well when I'm hungry. That might explain a lot, Beldin noted blandly. We should have fed you more often when you were younger. You can be terribly offensive sometimes, do you know that? Why, yes, as a matter of fact I do.

Everything is idiocy if you choose to look at it in the proper perspective.

The whole world is beautiful, Belgarion' Eriond assured him in response to that unspoken thought. 'You just have to know how to look at it

Then you've learned something today. No day in which you learn something is a complete loss.

It's the easiest thing in the world to judge things by appearances, Ce'Nedra," she said, "and it's usually wrong.

Wise are you, indeed," the fox said, "to know what is not possible before you have made the attempt.

A day in which you learn something isn't a complete loss.

No day in which you learn something is a complete loss.

Everything is idiocy if you choose to look at it in the proper light, he replied philosophically.

I don't think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their confusion .

This wise old whiskery fish swims up to three young fish and goes, 'Morning, boys, how's the water?' and swims away; and the three young fish watch him swim away and look at each other and go, 'What the fuck is water?' and swim away.

In reality, genuine epiphanies are extremely rare. In contemporary adult life maturation & acquiescence to reality are gradual processes. Modern usage usually deploys epiphany as a metaphor. It is usually only in dramatic representations, religious iconography, and the 'magical thinking' of children that insight is compressed to a sudden blinding flash.

I]f the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is.

That other people can often see things about you that you yourself cannot see, even if those people are stupid.

this was depressing, much the way discovering that somebody is easy to manipulate is always a little depressing.

Don't worry about getting in touch with your feelings, they'll get in touch with you.

Everybody who really wants to knows what's true. Most people just don't want to. It means listening from deep inside. Most people just don't want to. But the special people listen. You can hear what's true, inside. Listen.

other people can often see things about you that you yourself cannot see, even if those people are stupid.

It may well be that we, spectators, who are not divinely gifted as athletes, are the only ones able truly to see, articulate, and animate the experience of the gift we are denied. And that those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius must, perforce, be blind and dumb about it -- and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence.

The kid has no idea he even knows something's wrong

Naive people are, more or less by definition, unaware that they're naive.

The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. States as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude - but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.

Authors are monkeys who mean

Some answer or trick of the will: the ability not to think about it. What if everyone knew this trick but Claude Sylvanshine?