Quotes About Insight

He will perceive that there are far more excellent qualities in the student than preciseness and infallibility; that a guess is often more fruitful than an indisputable affirmation, and that a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments

The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means to an education.

He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds.

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

We are never tired so long as we can see far enough.

Tomorrow, a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time.

None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed. Ah me! no man goeth alone. All men go in flocks to this saint or that poet, avoiding the God who seeth in secret. They cannot see in secret; they love to be blind in public. They think society is wiser than their soul, and know not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the whole world.

a man only knows what he's experienced

Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds.

I know too well how slowly we edge along sideways to every thing good & brilliant in our lives & how casually and unobservedly we make all our most valued acquaintances.

All writing comes by the grace of God.

Our eyes are holden that we cannot see things that stare us in the face, until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened; then we behold them, and the time when we saw them not is like a dream.

Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds.

A mind might ponder its thought for ages, and not gain so much self-knowledge as the passion of love shall teach it in a day.

I grieve that grief can teach me nothing.

When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practical man relies on the language of the first.

The learned and the studious of thought have no monopoly of wisdom. Their violence of direction in some degree disqualifies them to think truly. We owe many valuable observations to people who are not very acute or profound, and who say the thing without effort which we want and have long been hunting in vain.

The wise man through an excess of wisdom is made a fool.

Some men's words I remember so well that I must often use them to express my thought. Yes, because I perceive that we have heard the same truth, but they have heard it better.

The years teach much which the days never know.

It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the best books.

Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations.

a good reader makes a good book

The ancient precept, "Know thyself," and the modern precept, "Study nature," become at last one maxim.