Quotes About Insight

Maintaining order rather than correcting disorder is the ultimate principle of wisdom. To cure disease after it has appeared is like digging a well when one feels thirsty, or forging weapons after the war has already begun. —NEI JING, 2ND CENTURY BC

Mantener el orden en lugar de corregir el desorden es el principio máximo de la sabiduría. Curar la enfermedad después de que ha aparecido es como cavar un pozo cuando uno tiene sed, o forjar armas después de que la guerra ha comenzado. NEI JING, siglo II d. C.

Ordnung zu halten, statt Unordnung aufzuräumen, ist das Grundprinzip der Weisheit. Eine Krankheit zu heilen, nachdem sie aufgetreten ist, ist wie einen Brunnen zu graben, wenn man Durst hat, oder Waffen zu schmieden, wenn der Krieg bereits ausgebrochen ist. – Nei Jing, 2. Jh. v. Chr.

The purpose of this book is not to make you more worried. The purpose of this book is to make you more smart.

Two men, on opposite sides of the world, had made the same great discovery at the same time.

Not only are islands impoverished relative to the mainlands, but small islands are more severely impoverished than large ones. That bit of insight became famed as the species-area relationship.

disappointment, in science, is sometimes a gateway to insight.

Everything important we learn too late.

We refuse to let our knowledge, however limited, be informed by your ignorance, however vast.

WHEN you are creeping through the literary underbrush hoping to bag a piece of humor with your net, nothing seems funny," Russell Baker wrote in a preface to an anthology of American humor that he compiled. "The thing works the other way around. Humor is funny when it sneaks up on you and takes you by surprise." Yes

The things that wound us are the most important things we know

Humility means accepting reality with no attempt to outsmart it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke of this encouraging possibility in his address at Harvard Divinity School in 1838: "We mark with light in the memory the few interviews we have had with souls that made our souls wiser, that spoke what we thought, that told us what we knew, that gave us leave to be what we inly are.

Sometimes reducing a problem to one short sentence can be enough to bring about insight on its own.

The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions. ANTHONY JAY

Trying to change other people's thinking appears to be one of the hardest tasks in the world. While the easy answer may seem to be to give people feedback, real change happens when people see things they have not seen before. The best way to help someone see something new is to help quiet her mind so that she can have a moment of insight. As you have insights, you change your brain, and by changing your brain you change your whole world.

I owe much to mother. She had an expert's understanding, but also approached art emotionally.

A window let in light, which was a metaphor for knowledge and understanding.

Knowledge was the most valuable of all treasures. No wonder

You don't know where you're going until you know where you've been?

The stress on observation and the reality principle—you can believe what you see, so long as you see what I see—paid off beyond understanding.

Leadership without perspective and point of view isn't leadership—and of course it must be your own perspective, your own point of view. You cannot borrow a point of view any more than you can borrow someone's eyes. It must be authentic, and if it is, it will be original, because you are an original.

I am familiar with the phrase, 'needle in a haystack' and I think I understand its meaning more than I wish to.

Artists, on the other hand, talk to determine what works, what does not, and why. Their focus is more on the micro; it moves from the inside out.