Quotes About Insight

we are overwhelmed with information and dying for wisdom.

But in a still life, there is no end to our looking, which has become allied with the gaze of the painter; we look in and in, to the world of things, in their ambiance of cool or warm light, in and in, as long as we can stand to look, as long as we take pleasure in looking.

It's a familiar experience to poets, that arrival of a phrase laden with more sense than we can immediately discern, a cluster of words that seems to know, as it were, more than we do.

You can know an animal - or a person, for that matter - in an instant, really, though your understanding can go on unfolding for years.

Does the poem reside in experience or in self-consciousness about experience?

Metaphor is a way of knowing the world, and no less a one than other sorts of ways of gaining knowledge.

objective perspective

The thing with me. I can't stick musicians. I've thought about this. I can't stand them, and being stuck in a studio with them I think that's my strength I can hear what they can't.

True wisdom is the ability to see things as they really are. This is a gift the ring cannot bequeath. What wisdom Frodo has must come from a different source

The reason to read Blake and Dickinson and Freud and Dickens is not to become more cultivated or more articulate... The best reason to read them is to see if they may know you better than you know yourself. You may find your own suppressed and rejected thoughts flowing back to you with an "alienated majesty

The English major reads because, as rich as the one life he has may be, one life is not enough. He reads not to see the world through the eyes of other people but effectively to become other people.

Reading is life's grand second chance.

Browning calls the poet God's spy and that's a complimentary way of putting it. We could say, more neutrally, that writers are almost always spies and have the kinds of lives that spying creates. They are constantly collecting information, making mental notes.

Depressed people think they know themselves, but maybe they only know depression.

The only way to find out where I was was to get out of the way and let myself happen.

Enlightenment does not mean getting rid of anything. It means changing one's frame of reference so that all things become enlightening.

to discriminate between the real and artificial is the beginning of wisdom;

A traveller learns more than a passenger.

Good literature is a mirror through which we see ourselves more clearly.

WILL'S RULES FOR LIVING #13: READ BOOKS TO GET SMARTER. READ PEOPLE TO BECOME WISER.

Knowing isn't understanding

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way." —DORIS LESSING Ordinary

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way." —DORIS LESSING

Years ago, for instance, I realized that most of the CEOs and managers I meet are not just smart but also wise—but they don't often get a chance to share their wisdom. They're focused so intently on the mundane day-to-day problems of running a business that they rarely have the opportunity to think deeply and creatively and use their highest and usually considerable intellectual abilities.