Quotes About Insight

found folly everywhere, but there were grains of wisdom in every stream of it. No doubt there was much more wisdom that I failed to recognize. Life is hard, Mr. Scoresby, but we cling to it all the same.

Perhaps, she thought calmly, whatever moves the alethiometer's needle is making the Aurora glow too.

She watched it calmly, content not to know at first but to know that a meaning was coming, and then it began to clear. She let it dance on until it was certain.

He couldn't possibly have said why. He knew it at once, as strongly as he knew that fire burned and kindness was good.

Lyra was bursting to interrupt, because she knew this process. So did Dr Malone, and so did the poet Keats, whoever he was, and all of them knew you couldn't get it by straining towards it.

Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.

He is not simply looking into the mirror because he is transfixed by what he sees. Rather, the artist's success depends as much as anything on his powers of detachment, on de-narcissizing himself… Freud… studied his own dreams not because he was a "narcissist," but because he was a student of dreams. And whose were at once the least and most accessible of dreams, if not his own?

The pompous son of a bitch knows everythingit's too bad he doesn't know anything else.

In short, dozens of conflicting, truncated impressions were already teasing to be understood, but the wisest course seemed to me to keep them to myself so long as I didn't begin to know what they added up to.

If you don't know the fantasy life of a country, it's hard to write fiction about it.

In nome della ragione, si cerca sempre un motivo più elevato, un significato più profondo: allora avevo ancora l'abitudine di sforzarmi di essere ragionevole anche sull'irragionevole e cercare la complessità nelle cose semplici. Esigevo risposte dalla mia intelligenza, quando non erano affatto necessarie. Pensavo: non può essere così meschino e insulso come sembra. Questo non può essere che un decimo della sua storia. Deve avere, dentro, qualcosa di più.

exformation, which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient.

David Foster Wallace

Did you take lessons in stupidity, or does it come naturally?

You broke the problem down and examined the component parts. Most men attempt to solve riddles by allowing their minds to leap like monkeys from branch to branch, without ever realizing that it is the root that needs examining. Always remember that, young prince. The method works with men as well as it works with riddles.

think I loved my Danny more. And I think I know why.

Sometimes, when you run through all of the questions, you have an answer while other times you end up with nothing to show for your effort but the ticklish amusement of flexing your brain.

Whenever I read history, I feel as though I am hopelessly surrounded by hopelessly stupid people.

The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.

We must know. We will know.

Sometimes it happens that a man's circle of horizon becomes smaller and smaller, and as the radius approaches zero it concentrates on one point. And then that becomes his point of view.

The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality.

Maybe everyone was part con man. Maybe everybody was in the game, and Phil just knew better than anyone else how to play.

Peter didn't want to change the world: he wanted to fully comprehend it.