Quotes About Insight

He would sit down and consider the situation carefully. Not only did this help to identify the solution to the problem, but it also gave him the opportunity to remind himself that things were not really as bad as they seemed; it was all a question of perspective. Sitting down and looking up at the sky for a few minutes--not at any particular part of the sky, but just at the sky in general--at the vast, dizzying, empty sky of Botswana, cut human problems down to size.

And the difference was this, she mused: those who are twenty don't know what it is like to be forty, whereas those who are forty know what it is like to be twenty. It was a bit like discussing a foreign country with somebody who has never been there. They are prepared to listen, but it's not quite real for them.

Yes, wisdom: that was something that came to everybody, although it came in varying quantities and at different times.

You do not have to read a book to understand how the world works. You just have to keep your eyes open.

Lions walk on four legs, observed Mma Makutsi. Was this man walking on four legs? That can be a big giveaway, Mma.

Never try to reach a conclusion before you reach the conclusion.

Mother was right, you know. It's an odd thing, isn't it: you never want your mother to be right, but the older you get, the more right you realise your mother was. All those things that mothers say, all those annoying things, turn out to be right.

But some of us cannot see love, she said to herself, even when it is there, right before us, asking us to invite it in.

A woman sees more than a man sees. That is well-known.

usually better to seek the advice of a stranger—not just any stranger, of course, as one could hardly go out onto the street and confide in the first person one encountered, but a stranger whom you knew to be wise.

The more you listen, the more you learn.

That was always the case, she thought: the perfect riposte, the mot juste, inevitably occurred well after the event, and one could not really write to somebody and tell them what you would have said had you thought about it in time.

He was one of those people, she thought, who just seemed to know a great deal. And he spoke so wisely, as if had thought for hours about everything he said.

Bim allowed herself to smile as the thought occurred to her that perhaps the reason why Signe had two boyfriends was that if you put them together, with their obvious defects, you would end up with one, complete boyfriend.

We assume so much, don't we? We assume that our children are going to be reasonable. We assume they're going to see things as we see them. And then suddenly we discover that they can look at things quite differently.

Small ones too, Mma Sometimes big problems are really tiny ones when you look at them in the right way.

There was that quality of sensitivity, that look in his eyes that told her, and everybody else who cared to look for it, that he understood , but, at the same time, that he was elsewhere.

Some knowledge is a fish," she muttered. "Some is a serpent.

There are roads to Damascus, she told herself. People travel on them.

Betjeman, called him sentimental, but he could hit the nail on the head when it came to describing people's feelings; and he had written there about a man coming out of a doctor's surgery, his X-ray photos tucked under his

The obvious, Ulf once observed, is rarely the obvious until the passage of time has proved it so.

That, she imagined, was because he had been given the eyes to see things, as we are given the eyes of those who have gone before us, and can see the world in the way in which they saw it.

All of us had a view from somewhere

All cats are grey in the dark, he had written in one chapter. So remember that how much you can see of a situation depends on how much light you can shine upon it.