Quotes About Insight

Bitter experience has taught us how fundamental our values are and how great the mission they represent.

Self discovery is something you cannot buy

She couldn't see the mathematical beauty in a leaf, the miracle in a seed that becomes a seedling, the absolute wonder that is the earth and the sea and the sky. He would try to talk to her of these things and receive only dismissive comments in reply. He learned from her to keep his mouth shut.

We tend to listen to Mozart with ears trained by Beethoven, and that's not the best way to listen to Mozart.

Ik houd me maar aan de regel van de oude koning, die heeft gezegd dat één ontstoken vuurpijl meer licht verspreidt dan honderd kisten vuurwerk op zolder.

We forget that the accumulation of knowledge and the holding of convictions must finally result in the application of that knowledge and those convictions to life itself.

Jane Austen's books are always, to some extent, concerned with the problem of learning by painful experience

"Only a novel"… in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.

now he knows

I feel like my honesty gives people the freedom to talk about things they wouldn't otherwise.

On the whole I think poems don't crawl out of dreams. They are knocked out of rocks.

I was seeing something I didn't understand and did not want to. No I wasn't. I was seeing something I had always understood and wanted to understand better.

It is books that are a key to the wide world; if you can't do anything else, read all that you can.

Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being.

if you see for yourself, hear for yourself, and enter deeply enough this seeing and hearing, all things will speak with and through you.

Zen is less the study of doctrine than a set of tools for discovering what can be known when the world is looked at with open eyes.

The desire of monks and mystics is not unlike that of artists: to perceive the extraordinary within the ordinary by changing not the world but the eyes that look… To form the intention of new awareness is already to transform and be transformed.

Wherever the gaze rests, art will draw it also elsewhere, will remind that there is always more. Alice does not stop and face her own reflection in the looking-glass: she travels through it.

To plunge one thing into the shape or nature of another is a fundamental gesture of creative insight, part of how we make for ourselves a world more expansive, deft, fertile, and startling in richness.

Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R. P. Blackmur said.

There is no dwelling in past, present or future and one is able to see the world without any pre-conceptions.

Koan study is specifically designed to short-circuit the whole intellectual process and experience reality directly.

Anthropology was the science that gave her the platform from which she surveyed, scolded and beamed at the world.

I've come to recognize what I call my 'inside interests.' Telling stories. And helping people tell their stories is a sort of interpersonal gardening. My work at NBC News was to report the news, but in hindsight, I often tried to look for some insight to share that might spark a moment of recognition in a viewer.