Quotes About Insight

a discovery you make yourself is worth twenty thousand things that you are taught, even if it is a discovery that everyone else has made.

Humans have a tendency to look for things in the places where it is easiest to search for them rather than in the places where the truth is more likely to be found.

Proust, "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes." Adele recalls a moment when she experienced

To doggedly look for marital causes in cases like these is an example of what's known as the "streetlight effect," where the drunken man is searching for his missing keys not where he dropped them but where the light is. Human beings have a tendency to look for things in the places where it is easiest to search for them rather than in the places where the truth is more likely to be found.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

we can tolerate seeing

Looking back, he asks himself, "How could I not see?" But it is human nature to cling to our sense of reality, to resist its possible shattering even in the face of irrefutable evidence. I assure him that his "cluelessness" is not something to be ashamed of. This kind of avoidance is not an act of idiocy but an act of self-preservation.

The wisdom acquired with the passage of time is a useless gift unless you share it.

Another important statement

All experience is an enrichment rather than an impoverishment.

Great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us how to face our feelings and face our actions and to have new inklings about what they mean. A good novel of any year can initiate us into our own new experience.

It's always taken a lot out of me, being smart.

The first act of insight is throw away the labels. In fiction, while we do not necessarily write about ourselves, we write out of ourselves, using ourselves; what we learn from, what we are sensitive to, what we feel strongly about--these become our characters and go to make our plots. Characters in fiction are conceived from within, and they have, accordingly, their own interior life; they are individuals every time.

Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.

To imagine yourself inside another person...is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.

The first thing we notice about our story is that we can't really see the solid outlines of it--it seems bathed in something of its own. It is wrapped in an atmosphere. This is what makes it shine, perhaps, as well as what initially obscures its plain, real shape.

If I tell these private thoughts of mine, it is because I know they are not mine alone, and that practically everyone is trying to say the same things and that the writer is only a man who says out loud what other people think or whisper.

Truth has only two sides, but it's the third side that's best.

It is true that all authors have tried to make propaganda. The great ones are those who failed, who have gained access, consciously or not, to a deeper and more universal reality.

Man in fact is petty: the problem of death is a human problem. A cow doesn't think about death. A cow isn't petty

Dans la vie, il faut regarder par la fenêtre. (XI, 61)

You had to suffer shipwreck through your own efforts before you were ready to seize the lifebelt he threw you. Believe me, I know from my own experience that the Master knows you and each of his pupils much better than we know ourselves. He reads in the souls of his pupils more than they care to admit.

If cats could write history, their history would be mostly about cats.

No book can be appreciated until it has been slept with and dreamed over.