Quotes About Insight

Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live.

The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.

People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come in to the mind of others.

Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else's shoes for a while.

Listen once in a while. It's amazing what you can hear.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

And so while the great ones depart to their dinner, the secretary stays, growing thinner and thinner, racking his brain to record and report what he thinks that they think that they ought to have thought.

While drawing, I discover what I really want to say.

Just once in a while let us exalt the importance of ideas and information.

An expert is a person who avoids the small errors while sweeping on to the grand fallacy.

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it.

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.

Experience is what you get while looking for something else.

While one man can discover a certain thing by himself, another is never able to understand it, even if taught by means of all possible expressions and metaphors, and during a long period; his mind can in no way grasp it, his capacity is insufficient for it.

Sometimes something opens up in your brain as I'm writing, thinking about the song, and it's like a whirlwind. It all comes together and I could hear what I wanted the songs to sound like, I just didn't know how to express it.

When you hit a groove, it's not you; it's the spirit world. The spirits whisper the ideas in your brain and prod you along. They're the ones that are really happy.

Although humans see reality in colour, for me, black and white has always been connected to the image's deeper truth, to its most hidden meaning.

What this White House really needs is a chief of staff who can read Machiavelli in the original Italian.

I wish I had known when I was in the White House what I know now about the Third World.

'What I would give,' I thought, 'to have been present as Elizabeth Keckley measured Mary Lincoln for a new gown, to overhear their conversations on topics significant and ordinary, to observe the Lincoln White House from such an intimate perspective.'

My first kiss was onscreen. My character learned to drive before I did, so when they asked me to hit the mark with that giant Lincoln, I hit the camera instead. Being an actor gives an interesting perspective on life. And in my case, an interesting preview.

Every book I've written has been a different attempt to understand something, and the success or failure of the previous one is irrelevant. I write the book I want.

Good council has no price.

I knew many Marines had done brave deeds that no one saw and for which they got no medals at all. I was having a very hard time carrying those medals and didn't have the insight or maturity to know what to do with my combination of guilt and pride.