Quotes About Insight

I know that nothing has ever been real without my beholding it. All becoming has needed me. My looking ripens things ? Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

Suchen Sie die Tiefe der Dinge: dort steigt Ironie nie hinab.

If it were possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and a little beyond the outworks of our intuitions, perhaps we should then bear our sadnessess with greater assurance than our joys.

I am learning to see. Why, I cannot say, but all things enter more deeply into me; nor do the impressions remain at the level where they used to cease. There is a place within me of which I knew nothing. Now all things tend that way. I do not know what happens there.

For, if we think of this existence of the individual as a room - be it large or small - it is evident that most people only get to know a corner of their room, a corner by the window, a strip on which they walk up or down.

The wish to improve another person's situation presupposes a level of insight into his conditions that even a poet does not possess with regard to a character he himself invented.

Aprendo a ver. No sé por qué, todo penetra en mí más profundamente, y no permanece donde, hasta ahora, todo terminaba siempre. Tengo un interior que ignoraba. Así es desde ahora. No sé lo que pasa.

All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was.

To see around corners is enough (that is not unusual when you are invisible). But to hear around them is too much; it inhibits action.

That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality. I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.

Power, for the writer….lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.

that's when you got your first peep through the crack in the wall of life and saw hell laughing like a gang of drunk farmers watching a dogfight on a country road.

Why do you laugh?" he said. "Because at a price I now see that which I couldn't see," I said.

There's nothing like isolating a man to make him think.

Maybe it's just that some of us have had certain facts and truths slapped up against our heads so hard and so often that we have to see them and pay our respects to their reality.

Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.

In my walks, every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from him.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.

The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained and he only holds the key to his own secret.

Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers in it

Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great.