Quotes About Insight

good art illustrates anything at all, it's likely to be a story you didn't even know needed telling.

I have learned to have more faith in the scientist than he does in himself.

The secret to life is: there is no secret.

History's lessons are no more enlightening than the wisdom of those who interpret them.

Statistics are information, not condemnation.

Why does it help to read others' stories? It is not only that misery loves company, because (I learned) misery is too self-absorbed to want much company. Others' experiences did help with my emotional struggle...

The paradox of illuminating complexity is that it is inherently difficult to do so without erasing all of the nuance.

The center of the artistic process—for me—is the attempt to transform a particular feeling, insight, sorrow into a metaphor and then make that metaphor ramify so it holds everything, everything in the world.

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see, and what it means.

The most elementary book on arithmetic contains more knowledge and insight about reality than the collected sayings of every guru who ever lived.

We must reinvent a future free of blinders so that we can choose from real options.

I was eternally earthbound, a witness but no prophet.

Quantitative data tell us what people are doing. Qualitative data tell us why people are doing it. The best kind of research combines the two kinds of data.

A college president I know keeps three books on his night table: the Bible, the Iliad, and Louis Auchincloss' 1964 novel The Rector of Justin. When I once asked him, "Why the novel?," he responded, "Because it raises questions I cannot answer or ignore, the sort of questions that possess a wisdom apart from answers.

The whole key to life is discovering things for yourself. What you do with that discovery is what lies on the other side of that door.

What I have not seen or failed to see I leave as a gift.

Poetry is the art of overhearing ourselves say things from which it is impossible to retreat.

God's greatest gift is to endow human beings with the capacity to perceive - and the create - holiness.

That is how the human brain works, when it looks at a formless cloud, it tries to see a shape, or a face, or otherwise associate it with something that makes sense in some known cultural context, like the proverbial image of the Virgin Mary seen in the grain of a tree stump, or a slice of toast. But make no mistake—the observer supplies the face.

but anyway he says that when you read the Bible, the Devil looks back at you through the pages.

She wasn't some little princess from the suburbs who just graduated college with a humanities degree, she knew what people were really like.

I collect. Though I guess that wording would imply that I seek this stuff out; I actually meant "collect" in the way that dead bugs "collect" on your windshield.

Beliefs are the eyelids of the mind.

It's not enough to look for the truth, however a noble journey that might be. [...] You must be able to say "yes" to what you see. [...] He is the yeasayer who could look upon evil, disease and suffering, all the worst incarnations of the Eternal No, and not fall insane. He is the great-souled one who can affirm the truth of the Universe.