Quotes About Insight

Every biblical story reflects something that mattered to its author. Whenever we figure out what it was and why it mattered, we move a step closer to knowing who wrote a part of the Bible.

A man doesn't begin to attain wisdom until he recognizes that he is no longer indispensable.

Resolution, like responsibility, is a product of ownership, and kids can't resolve a conflict until they figure out how they contributed to it.

What I cannot create, I do not understand.

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

A good book ... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.

She was an artist. She held opposites in her mind.

At the exact moment any decision seems to be being made, it's usually long after the real decision was actually made--like light we see emitted from stars.

Understand--it ALWAYS makes sense. Sense can't be avoided. If it first seems to be non-sense, wait: roots will reveal themselves.

discovery starts with anomalies.

That does not mean something is wrong with us as humans, but it does mean that our understanding of human behavior can be improved by appreciating how people systematically go wrong.

The first step to overturning conventional wisdom, when conventional wisdom is wrong, is to look at the world around you. See the world as it is, not as others wish it to be.

Almost everyone who opens up a new field does not really understand it the way the followers do." The evidence for this is, unfortunately, all too good. It has been said in physics no creator of any significant thing ever understood what he had done.

We must come down from our heights, and leave our straight paths, for the byways and low places of life, if we would learn truths by strong contrasts; and in hovels, in forecastles, and among our own outcasts in foreign lands, see what has been wrought upon our fellow-creatures by accident, hardship, or vice. Two

The writer is a kind of tuning-fork for a melody yet to be composed.

The highest achievement results from mastering one's senses. Wisdom comes when we are no longer interested in worldly things.

The mind which has attained wisdom and peace becomes a mirror of all creation.

What is ordinary to you may be a desert of woeful newness to another.

I have to confess that, in the years I have spent as a schoolteacher, I have learned much more from my students than they have from me. While that will surely sound like a feigned humility, it isn't feigned, and it isn't humility either.

We'd gotten him wrong. He wasn't a dunce. He was an artist. According to these pages, he'd seen us all a good deal clearer than we'd ever seen him.

Yes, I think you'll find that all the best teachers are old bats.

Hayseeds we might be, but we meant to be informed hayseeds.

It's amazing how crazy things become, once you start looking at them.

Life has a way of talking to the future. It's called memory.