Quotes About Insight

Fitzgerald said that the sign of genius is being able to hold two contradictory ideas in your head at the same time. But what if you hold two contradictory fears? Are you still some kind of a genius?

When only one person is the expert on a particular people, do we learn more about the people or the anthropologist when we read the analysis?

Glimpses of how it really was before us are rare, if not impossible.

the one people she was meant to study, a people whose genius she would unlock, and who would unlock hers, a people who had a way of life that made sense to her.

We're always, in everything we do in this world, she said, limited by subjectivity. But our perspective can have an enormous wingspan, if we give it the freedom to unfurl.

You spend enough time at the racetrack, you know your horse, okay? You always know your horse.

The best mind altering drug is the truth.

Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.

Sometimes I think we'd be better off blind.

Life is a lesson. You learned it when you're through.

When one's thoughts and experience have not reached a certain point for reading a masterpiece, the masterpiece will leave only a bad flavor on his palate.

Reality + Dreams + Humor = Wisdom   So

The wise man reads both books and life itself.

Anyone who reads a book with a sense of obligation does not understand the art of reading.

Sometimes it is more important to discover what one cannot do, than what one can do.

The purpose of a short story is ... that the reader shall come away with the satisfactory feeling that a particular insight into human character has been gained, or that his (or her) knowledge of life has been deepened, or that pity, love or sympathy for a human being is awakened.

The Bible says somewhere that we are desperately selfish. I think we would have discovered that fact without the Bible.

The simplest explanation is most often the correct one.

La capacità di apprezzare le cose ha il potere di trasformare la banalità in qualcosa di bello.

A dark heart sees the things that an honest one is blinded to by the nature of its own goodness.

Those who think differently from us sometimes possess truths we have not yet discovered.

Nothing you think at twenty-five is so.

Your library is your portrait.

If you want to understand the life of a foreign city, how people go about their day-to-day business, what they buy and what they look like, go to the supermarket. I rarely have the need to purchase a box of breakfast cereal or a loaf of bread while abroad, but watching others do it tells me more about a place than being led around in a crocodile behind a tour guide's umbrella.