Quotes About Insight

Always reward the bringers of information, whether the news is good or bad: that was one of his basic rules.

The Fool sees not the same tree the wise man sees.

Ask them about a particular apple and they will tell you about the gross national product; ask about this chair right here and they'll go on at length about the evolution of furniture. They are not avoiding the subject; they are looking at it philosophically, in the round, as it were. The specific information you are seeking never comes through.

Personally, I don't trust mystic experiences, including my own — although I seek them and enjoy them. I think Altered Consciousness offers new ways of perceiving/conceiving and should start philosophical investigation, not stop it.

Then I began to discover something about synchronicity and the imagination. Some of the most absurd things that we invented turned out to be true, and that really blew my mind.

Constant reminding ourselves that we do not see with our eyes but with our synergetic eye-brain system working as a whole will produce constant astonishment as we notice, more and more often, how much of our perceptions emerge from our preconceptions.

Norbert Weiner once simplified the meaning of this equation by saying that great poetry contains more information than political speeches. You never know what will come next in a truly creative poem, but in a George Bush speech you not only know what will come next, you probably could predict the whole speech, in general, before he even opens his mouth.

Robert Anton Wilson helped me realize that not all doors lead outward. The best ones, the ones that lead to the most exciting and uncharted places, are within. And no one in this world can withhold the key that unlocks those doors from us.

Nobody knows why Achilles wept, but we all know that he must have wept; just as we know that Lear must have prayed for the poor hungry wretches that night on the moor. A Homer or a Shakespeare creates such scenes without knowing why they must be just as they are; and we weep over them without knowing how we are sure that they are true.

In terms of Information Theory, this appears as a dramatic increase in the amount of information processed per second. The more new circuits opened in the brain, the more new information you notice in even the simplest and most familiar objects or events. To quote Blake, The fool sees not the same tree that the wise man sees.

Like marijuana, a Wellesian long shot creates an information overload and provokes you to enlarge your reality-tunnel to accommodate it.

It is not impossible, however uncongenial the thought may be to the Citadel, that many unscientific reality-tunnels, explored by, say, painters, or poets, or musicians, or novelists, or mystics, may be not non-existent but merely not-tuned-in by those who have not practiced for many years in tuning-in painterly or poetic or musical or novelistic or mystical brain circuits.

The Irish proverb quoted at the beginning — If you see a two-headed pig, keep your mouth shut — contains profound pragmatic wisdom. Maybe most people are shrewd enough to understand that, and the reports that get into books like this are a small, very small, cross-section of the Chaos that is actually going on around us. Maybe.

Jesus Christ," she said. "You are just like him, a master of the fucking oblique answer.

To imply something," Jesse said, "you have to know something. I'm just trying to learn.

Get far enough away and it looks kinda pretty, don't it?" she said. "You only get order from a distance. Close up is always messy." "Yeah," I said, "but your own life is always close up. You only see other people's lives at long range.

We do much better," she said, "explaining why people did things than we do at predicting what they will do.

It was just a sense that in almost all my dealings with almost everyone I'd talked with, there was another story being told that I couldn't hear.

Since when do you and I talk about the world," she said. "The world is what it is." "Yeah, I know." "Not only do you know, you've helped me to know." "Good to be useful," I said. "What has always made me respect you, even in the bad times, was your ability to look out at the world and see what's there. Not what you'd like to see, or even what you need to see, but simply what's there.

Theory is no substitute for information," Susan said.

me that the heart is slow to learn what the swift mind beholds at every turn.

A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears. See how yon justice rails upon yon simple thief. Hark in thine ear: change places and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? - King Lear

You need to be able to hear the truth, he thought. You can't hear the truth, you got nowhere to start.

Trivial, he echoed. Perhaps. Then again, maybe it's all in the way you look at it