Quotes About Insight

telling. I thought I knew this

How is it possible to know so much about a person and yet know nothing at all?

Though life has to be lived forward, it can only be understood backwards

No matter what else people may steal from you, they will never be able to take away your knowledge.

Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz

We can chart our future clearly and wisely only when we know the path which has led to the present.

That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes the height of wisdom in another.

Man is a strange animal, he doesn't like to read the handwriting on the wall until his back is up against it.

Therefore I will not 'learn' politics but let politics teach me.

Now for the first time I learned to know men and I learned to distinguish between empty appearances or brutal manners and the real inner nature of the people who outwardly appeared thus.

I am firmly convinced today that, generally speaking, it is in youth that men lay the essential groundwork of their creative thought, wherever that creative thought exists. I distinguish between the wisdom of age-which can only arise from the greater profundity and foresight that are based on the experiences of a long life-and the creative genius of youth.

In scrutinizing the past, we must be careful not to be overly impressed by external results that readily strike the eye, while ignoring the less visible causes of these results.

In order not to despair completely of the people with whom I lived, I had to separate the outward appearances of their lives from the reasons why they developed that way. Then I could bear everything without discouragement.

The man who has no sense of history, is like a man who has no ears or eyes

We humans have grown cleverer but not wiser .

Lovallo and Kahneman offer a useful prescription to repair this cognitive bias: Get the data. Track down actual figures on launch failure rates for your company, your industry, other industries or projects similar to yours. The numbers will be fascinating – and sobering.

Intelligence is no substitute for wisdom. Live long enough to get wise, eh?

According to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, "She was duller than himself, and consequently did not find out that he was so.

Blink, and you'll miss your treasure. Blink again, and you'll realize that the truth you thought was completely hidden, has materialized some ungainly part of it revealed under new conditions.

Books will change your life... you have no idea how much you can learn about yourself by plunging into someone else's life. You can read your way into a whole new narrative for yourself.

When someone tells me a piece of the truth which has been withheld from me, and which I needed in order to see my life more clearly, it may bring acute pain, but it can flood me with a cold, sea-sharp wash of relief.

My visionary anger cleansing my sight.

Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.

What we see, we see and seeing is changing