Quotes About Insight

Many people after a horrific few months or years of breakdown, will say: "I don't know how I'd ever have gotten well if I hadn't fallen ill".

Maturity begins with the capacity to sense and, in good time and without defensiveness, admit to our own craziness. If we are not regularly deeply embarrassed by who we are, the journey to self-knowledge hasn't begun.

Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.

To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.

feeling things (which usually means feeling them painfully) is at some level linked to the acquisition of knowledge.

The important books should be those that leave us wondering, with relief and gratitude, how the author could possibly have known so much about our lives.

It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not to look at his world through our eyes.

Crucial insights that we need to convey to ourselves can often be received only at night, like city church bells that have to wait until dark to be heard. During

On account of its scale and complexity, the world will always outstrip the capacity of any single body to ask fertile questions of it.

Instead of bringing back sixteen thousand new plant species, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small, unfeted but life-enhancing thoughts.

A genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his his eyes, not look at his world through our eyes.

as we have seen, what

The epitome of empathy is said to be the capacity to look at the world through another's eyes. Though our glance on the planet is largely distorted by our crooked perspectives, we may nevertheless, with luck or agility, accede to a privileged glimpse of the view from another's shoes - and in the process claim to have been able, for a moment at least, to surmount our relativity.

We cannot be taught wisdom, we have to discover it for ourselves by a journey which no one can undertake

Ideal ar fi ca arta s? ne dea r?spunsurile pe care nu le primim de la oameni.

Jarenlang kwam ik bij het boodschappen doen langs een huis dat weliswaar een van de lelijkste gebouwen was dat ik ooit heb gezien, maar me ook meer over architectuur heeft geleerd dan menig meesterwerk.

It is the task of philosophy to let you down gently.

read the blueprint, to see your dream in black and

The darker the subject, the more light you must try to shed on the matter.

Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.

Life is rather like a tin of sardines - we're all of us looking for the key.

You don't put your life into books. You find it there.

Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, Sir Kevin, one just wishes one had more of it.