Quotes About Insight

One balks, then agrees, then balks again only to agree again; that is the way one learns things.

As she watched him, Mrs. Gates was once again struck by the painful realization that there were Ã¢â'¬Â¦ things Ã¢â'¬Â¦ about her husband she would never understand. Gaps in his life she could never fill, leaps in his thinking she could not comprehend.

Destiny is not one push, she thought as she waited to cross a quiet street on that cold Paris evening years later, but a thousand small moments that through insight and hard work you line up in the right direction, like the magnet does the metal shavings.

That was the secret, he believed, to success in any endeavor: to be a careful, knowledgeable, and efficient observer of the world, and to act in accordance with what you saw.

Before issuing a single directive or making a single decision, a leader should talk to people at every level of her organization, from the front office to the mail room. Career employees often have startlingly insightful views about the strengths and weaknesses of their organization, which of course they know well; as a result, they often have well-informed ideas for practical ways to improve it.

You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes much sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something.

First you get the feeling, then you figure out why.

Familiarity can blind you

Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20–20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go, unless where you ought to go is a continuation of where you were going in the past. Creativity, originality, inventiveness, intuition, imagination—"unstuckness," in other words—are completely outside its domain.

To reach him you have to back up and back up, and the further back you go, the further back you see you have to go, until what looked like a small problem of communication turns into a major philosophic inquiry.

For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. The more you look the more you see.

I turn my head from side to side.

May, will you please, kindly DIG it, he remembered one of them saying, and hold up on all those wonderful seven-dollar questions? If you got to ask what IS it all the time, you'll never get time to KNOW.

The solutions all are simple—after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are.

You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you're always in a compartment, and because you're used to it you don't realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV.

Waiting. For that missing seed crystal of thought that would suddenly solidify everything.

Why should an irrational method work when rational methods were all so rotten? He had an intuitive feeling, growing rapidly, that what he had stumbled on was no small gimmick. It went far beyond. How far, he didn't know.

There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.

preintellectual awareness. The subliminal self, Poincaré said, looks at a large number of solutions to a problem, but only the interesting ones break into the domain of consciousness.

You just sit and stare and think, and search randomly for new information, and go away and come back again, and after a while the unseen factors start to emerge.

Yolculuk etmek bazen, varmaktan daha iyidir.

At first this difference seemed fairly minor, but then it grew…and grew…and grew …until I began to see why I missed it. Some things you miss because they're so tiny you overlook them. But some things you don't see because they're so huge. We were both looking at the same thing, seeing the same thing, talking about the same thing, thinking about the same thing, except he was looking, seeing, talking and thinking from a completely different dimension.

Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the psychic predecessor of all real understanding.

What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness. Familiarity can blind you too.