Quotes About Insight

Humor is a rubber sword--it allows you to make a point without drawing blood.

It is important to note that children are rarely as unaware of their environment as they appear to be during withdrawal. In fact, many adopted toddlers have amazing insight and memory of people and events, and are astute observers, even when they appear oblivious of their surroundings. Therefore, it is important not to stop giving comfort, support, and structure. Those efforts are received and processed on some level even if not immediately apparent in the child's overt behavior.

For visions come not to polluted eyes.

Books had been invented to salve human loneliness, and they were friends without peer, friends who never sneered or flinched or laughed behind a man's back. Books revealed their treasures to all who took the effort to seek.

It is usually better if you don't try to predetermine your response, but rather ask each card, "Do you represent an ability of mine?

Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life.

Your heart, Mary Karr, he'd say. His pen touched my sternum, and it felt for all the world like the point of a dull spear as he said, Your heart knows what your head don't. Or won't.

The truth invariably arrives several years after you need it.

Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted.

There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.

Knowledge is the prime need of the hour.

Recently I realized that silent is an anagram for listen. It is the voice that comes from the silence that the writer or artist must listen to.

Misfortunes make us wise

It's very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down. I can't wait until morning - it'll be gone.

If you know about yourself, presumably you know about at least one other person.

The imagination equips us to perceive reality when it is not fully materialized.

In one sense, reading is a great waste of time. In another sense, it is a great extension of time, a way for one person to live a thousand and one lives in a single lifespan, to watch the great impersonal universe at work again and again,

It is not what a poem says with its mouth, it's what a poem does with its eyes.

The world was to me a secret which I desired to devine.

I suppose one gets to know men quickest by the things they take for granted.

Edward counseled that a photograph of consequence could be made from just about anything. Subject matter, in itself, was not critical. The understanding of the photographer was.

I don't want to have all the answers, just the right questions.

When we pass over into how a knight thinks, how a heroine behaves, and how an evildoer can regret or deny wrongdoing, we never come back quite the same; sometimes we're inspired, sometimes saddened, but we are always enriched. Through this exposure we learn both the commonality and the uniqueness of our own thoughts -- that we are individuals, but not alone.

An insight is a fleeting glimpse of the brain's huge store58 of unknown knowledge. The cortex is sharing one of its secrets. —Jonah Lehrer