Quotes About Insight

most people do not see things as they are, they see things as they are!

We see what we are ready to see, expect to see, and even desire to see.

It seems that human beings cannot see what they are not readied to see. We cannot hear what we have not been prepared to hear. The "obvious" seems to have little correlation with our acceptance of it. We all have an amazing capacity for missing the point.

We become what we are willing to see.

light is not so much what you directly see as that by which you see everything else.

JULIAN OF NORWICH AND THE FIRST

In Paul's story we find the archetypal spiritual pattern, wherein people move from what they thought they always knew to what they now fully recognize. The pattern reveals itself earlier in the Torah when Jacob "wakes from his sleep" on the rock at Bethel and says, in effect, "I found it, but it was here all the time! This is the very gate of heaven" (Genesis 28:16–17).

To stay on the surface of anything is invariably to miss its message—even the surface meaning of our sinfulness.

Remember, mystery isn't something that you cannot understand—it is something that you can endlessly understand!

Remember, light is not so much what you directly see as that by which you see everything else.

What Richard does is more like what Jesus did when he spoke in parables: He takes you to see from one angle, and then backs up and brings you to see from another angle, and then another, and then another, until a whole new way of seeing begins to dawn on you.

Juniors" on the first part of the journey invariably think that true elders are naive, simplistic, "out of it," or just superfluous. They cannot understand what they have not yet experienced. They are totally involved in their first task, and cannot see beyond it.

Contemplation is really the change that changes everything—especially, first of all, the seer.

Of course, clergy cannot talk about a further journey if they have not gone on it themselves.

But it takes us much longer to discover "the task within the task," as I like to call it: what we are really doing when we are doing what we are doing.

First of all, you can only see and understand the earlier stages from the wider perspective of the later stages. This is why mature societies were meant to be led by elders, seniors, saints, and "the initiated." They alone are in a position to be true leaders in a society, or certainly in any spiritual organization. Without them, "the blind lead the blind

The second insight about steps and stages is that from your own level of development, you can only stretch yourself to comprehend people just a bit beyond yourself.

It was a scary thought. A man could be surrounded by poetry reading and not know it.

aware, as always, that the truth isn't much of substitute for a good answer.

Knowing and knowing what to do about it were two different things.

Maybe this was the unstated purpose of education, to get young people to see the world through the tired eyes of age: disappointment and exhaustion and defeat masquerading as wisdom.

Whereas some people's attitude suggested that perhaps they knew something you didn't, Mrs. Whiting's implied that she knew everything you didn't. She alone had been paying attention, so it was her duty to bring you at least partially up to speed.

Only after we've done a thing do we know what we'll do, and by then whatever we've done has already begun to sever itself from clear significance, at least for the doer. Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves.

Is good fiction more likely to be about the air we breathe or the nose we breathe it through?