Quotes About Insight

What we have read makes us what we are – quite as much as what we have experienced and where we have been and who we have known. To read is to experience.

Some drink to forget, I drink to remember. I drink in order to understand what I mean and to discover what I know. Under its benign influence all the stories and dramas which properly belong to the sphere of art are announced by me in conversation.

the great advantage of really contemporary fiction is that one finds oneself mirrored on every page

The less you see, the more you can imagine.

Because the search for happiness can be like the search for your spectacles when they're sittin' on your

to live in perpetual darkness allows one to see things more clearly, if that is not a contradiction in terms. It has allowed me to look into men's souls more deeply, to see them for what they are and not what they present to the world. It has been a most illuminating experience.

Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.

Of all the important pieces of self-knowledge, understanding how you learn is the easiest to acquire.

Psychological despotism, whether enlightened or not, is gross misuse of psychology. The main purpose of psychology is to acquire insight into, and mastery of, oneself. Not for nothing were what we now call the behavioral sciences originally called the moral sciences and "Know thyself" their main precept. To use psychology to control, dominate, and manipulate others is self-destructive abuse of knowledge. It is also a particularly repugnant form of tyranny.

Brilliant men are often strikingly ineffectual; they fail to realize that the brilliant insight is not by itself achievement. They never have learned that insights become effectiveness only through hard systematic work.

The brilliant insight is not by itself achievement

To make knowledge productive, we will have to learn to see both forest and tree. We will have to learn to connect.

The greatest wisdom not applied to action and behavior is meaningless data.

Executives of necessity live and work within an organization. Unless they make conscious efforts to perceive the outside, the inside may blind them to the true reality.

When a change in perception takes place, the facts do not change. Their meaning does.

you get smarter the more you learn.

The trouble with great literature is that any asshole can identify with it.

Él piensa sobre sí mismo como si se tratara de otro; piensa sobre lo que le sucede, cuando sucede, como si ya hace mucho tiempo le hubiera sucedido a otro; y, a veces, piensa sobre uno al que ya hace mucho tiempo le sucedió algo como si fuera uno al que todavía le ha de suceder algo. Una vez él se quedó ciego.

The eye of the poet sees less clearly, but sees farther than the eye of the scientist.

God gives us not only the truth but also the ability to believe it; not only the new thing to see but also the new eye to see it with.

Philosophy says truth, literature shows truth.

Only the wise know folly; fools know neither wisdom nor folly. Just as it takes wisdom to know folly, light to know darkness, it takes profundity to know vanity, meaning to know meaninglessness.

Those who know, do not say; those who say, do not know.

For he believed not only that there was all truth somewhere but also that there was some truth everywhere.