Quotes About Insight

The ability to discern truth comes from learning, growing, and understanding the Bible.

Beauty is not required. Beauty is accuracy's distraction.

Most of humanity, he said, have eyes that are so caked shut with the dust of deception they will never see the truth, no matter who tries to help them.

She thought she knew much, but she knew nothing.

When asked how he could tell the difference, the saint said that you can only tell which is which by the way you feel after the creature has left your company. If you are appalled, he said, then it was a devil who had visited you. If you feel lightened, it was an angel.

Sometimes it's just true that other people have better ideas for your life than you do.

Rest assured, dear friend, that many noteworthy and great sciences and arts have been discovered through the understanding and subtlety of women, both in cognitive speculation, demonstrated in writing, and in the arts, manifested in manual works of labor. I will give you plenty of examples. Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies 1405

If you tell me slowly, I can understand quickly.

I wanted to call a time out, to demand that everybody just STOP until I could understand everything.

We need courage to take ourselves seriously, to look closely and without flinching, to regard the things that frighten us in life and art with wonder.

Boris Pasternak described this phenomenon beautifully, when he wrote, "No genuine book has a first page.

Oh, dear. Sometimes it takes a very long while to figure things out.

I was now inclined to believe that ideas also have wit, because what had transpired between Ann and me was not only phenomenal, but also curiously and charmingly funny.

Beauty is not required. Beauty is accuracy's distraction.

True wisdom gives the only possible answer at any given moment

Ann has a preternatural ability to render herself very small—nearly invisible—in order to better observe the world around her in safe anonymity, so that she can write about it, unnoticed. In other words, her superpower is to conceal her superpowers.

One wouldn't have noticed it before, but now it was obvious. It was as though Ambrose had opened an inlet to something previously invisible, and Alma could finally see a truth she would otherwise have been blind to forever.

And experience had already instructed Henry that learning things gave a person advantage over other people

But you must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead. That way, you will know God.

Sometimes it's just true that other people have better ideas for your life than you do.

Not merely alive, but outfitted with a mind that was functioning at the uppermost limits of its capacity—a mind that was seeing everything, and understanding everything, as though watching it all from the highest imaginable ridge.

You already know so much more than you think you know. You are not finished; you are merely ready.

I don't know what I think until I write about it (Joan Didion).

Asking no further questions is the song of my people.