Quotes About Insight

There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant

Tis the good reader that makes the good book.

We are wiser than we know.

Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.

To a dull mind all of nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear.

Wise men put their trust in ideas and not in circumstances.

Common sense is as rare as genius.

Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.

There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.

Imagination is a very high sort of seeing.

The world is his who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there only by sufferance,--by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow.

Meek young men grow up in libraries believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote those books.

The good writer seems to be writing about himself, but has his eye always on that thread of the Universe which runs through himself and all things.

To the illuminated mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.

The landscape belongs to the person who looks at it... -Ralph Waldo Emerson

We mark with light in the memory the few interviews we have had with souls that made our souls wiser, that spoke what we thought, that told us what we knew, that gave us leave to be what we inly are.

Imagination is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuits of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others.

We are immensed in beauty, but our eyes have no clear vision.

The years teach us much, which the days never knew.

Never read a book that is not a year old.

Only so much of life do I know as I have lived.

So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect, — What is truth? and of the affections, — What is good? by yielding itself passive to the educated Will. ... Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit.

Years teach much which the days never knew.