Quotes About Insight

When we allow ourselves to exist truly and fully, we sting the world with our vision and challenge it with our own ways of being.

Pay attention when someone gets mad, that's when their true colors show.

The fact is that they probably regarded aesthetic merits as material objects which an open eye could not help perceiving, without one's needing to ripen equivalents of them slowly in one's own heart.

Much that for us is fraught with with happiness or misery, remains almost unnoticed by the rest of the world.

I had been mistaken in thinking that I could see clearly into my own heart.

If we press for a definition of what their admirers mean by the epithet, we shall find that it is generally applied to some unusual picture of a familiar object, a picture different from those that we are accustomed to see, unusual and yet true to nature, and for that reason doubly impressive to us because it startles us, makes us emerge from our habits and at the same time brings us back to ourselves by recalling to us an earlier impression.

We are very slow in recognising in the peculiar physiognomy of a new writer the type which is labelled 'great talent' in our museum of general ideas. Simply because that physiognomy is new and strange, we can find in it no resemblance to what we are accustomed to call talent. We say rather originality, charm, delicacy, strength; and then one day we add up the sum of these, and find that it amounts simply to talent.

ceux qui apprennent sur la vie d'un autre quelque détail exact en tirent aussitôt des conséquences qui ne le sont pas et voient dans le fait nouvellement découvert l'explication de choses qui précisément n'ont aucun rapport avec lui.

Duchesse, "I happen to share his point of view. Although Elstir has done a fine portrait of me. You haven't seen it? It's not a good likeness, but it's intriguing. He's interesting to sit for. He's portrayed me like some old woman. It's modeled on Hals's The Women Regents of the Old Men's Almshouse

On ne reçoit pas la sagesse, il faut la découvrir soi-même après un trajet que personne ne peut faire pour nous, ne peut nous épargner.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, I understand all that," with a precision and a tone of intelligence which for some time deceived me; but other people, as we get to know them, are like a metal dipped in an acid bath, and we see them gradually lose their good qualities (and their bad qualities too, at times

Genius lies in reflective power, and not in the intrinsic quality of the scene reflected.

wand. Until then, because I had not understood, I had not seen.

It is the explanation that opens our eyes; the dispelling of an error gives us an additional sense.

But we learn nothing from any lesson because we have not the wisdom to work backwards from the particular to the general, and imagine ourselves always to be going through an experience which is without precedents in the past

This is obviously disloyal, and authors are a pretty low class. Certainly, it would not be a bad thing to meet them once in a way, for thanks to them, when one reads a book or an article, one can 'read between the lines,' 'unmask' the characters. After all, though, the wisest thing is to stick to dead authors.

In reality, every reader, as he reads, is the reader of himself. The work of the writer is only a sort of optic instrument which he offers to the reader so that he may discern in the book what he would probably not have seen in himself.

draw upon his knowledge of the world, if he read in a newspaper the names of the people who had been at a dinner-party, could tell at once its exact degree of smartness, just as a man of letters, simply by reading a sentence, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.

He had, indeed, one of the advantages which men who have lived and moved in society enjoy over those, however intelligent, who have not, namely that they no longer see it transfigured by the longing or repulsion which it inspires, but regard it as of no importance.

a man of great ability will ordinarily pay less attention to other people's foolishness than would a fool.

I was struck for the first time by this lack of harmony between our impressions and their normal forms of expression.

The end of a book's wisdom appears to us as merely the start of our own, so that at the moment when the book has told us everything it can, it gives rise to the feeling that it has told us nothing.

There are some faces which take on an unaccustomed beauty and majesty the moment they no longer have a gaze.

Swann made a hobby of collecting scraps of 'real life')