Quotes About Insight

Good sense, disciplined by experience and inspired by goodness, issues in practical wisdom.

All good ideas are terrible... Until people realize they are obvious. If you're not willing to live through the terrible stage, you'll never get to the obvious part.

The answer to the question "where do good ideas come from" is always the same, the come from bad ideas. If you come up with 20 bad ideas you get one good one.

Good drama should sandpaper the mind.

My ma says You can't unspill a stew." "She also says Undoing a wrong is greater than doing a right." "You know, Ma is very good at saying two things at once.

The best Qualification of a Prophet is to have a good Memory.

When someone offers me a job or a project, I always ask myself, "What does it tell me about the world?" and "Have I seen it before?" Two good questions.

No good book, or good thing of any sort, shows its best face at first.

It might be good to open our eyes and see.

I have a pretty good sense of when to express misgivings. And white critics are just as capable of pointing those things out and noticing them as people of color.

Being a bad parent is a sign of not having learned from experience.

A prince without letters is a Pilot without eyes. All his government is groping.

Government is like an onion. To understand it, you have to peel through many different layers. Most outsiders never get beyond the first or second layer.

Democratical States must always feel before they can see: it is this that makes their Governments slow, but the people will be right at last.

A government which is not liked by the artists is certainly a bad government, because artist sees very well what is behind the masks!

I don't have any insight or understanding on anything about the government. All I think is that it's stupid - which is the one perspective that's almost completely lacking in Washington.

Nothing worth knowing can be taught.

What is worse than having no sight is being able to see but having no vision.

No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.

The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.

The older I grow, the more I am convinced that there is no education which one can get from books and costly apparatus that is equal to that which can be gotten from contact with great men and women.

The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well.

Watch people do their most common actions; these are indeed the things that will tell you the real character of a great person.

You can learn great things from your mistakes when you aren't busy denying them.