Quotes About Insight

Just once I knew what life was for.

It is not enough to read Hesse and drink clam chowder, we must have the answers.

Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.

We have no firm hold on any knowledge or philosophy that can lift us out of our difficulties.

There is a way the truth hits you, both hard and gentle at the same time. It punches you in the stomach as it puts its loving arm around your shoulder. Yes, I am terrible to behold, the truth says. But you suspected it all along, didn't you? And isn't better, now that you know? Now, at least, it all makes sense.

Jack hesitated still, and Hazel wanted to say something comforting, give him some bright plastic flowers of words, but Jack would see them for what they were. Jack knew how to see things.

There are differences between facts and truths. Facts are something you now in your brain; truths are things you know in your heart.

Now, the world is more than it seems to be. You know this, of course, because you read stories.

Wheeler, P., and H. E. Rives. Dome of Many-Coloured Glass. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955.

Fürchterliche Ungewissheit? Fürchterlich nur so lange, als wir ihr nicht ins Auge zu blicken vermögen.

To see the Logos, the principle of consciousness, crucified on the cross of time and space in our own selves is not an evasion but among the most profound insights a human being can have.

To see, to know, to understand, even though the seeing blind, though the knowledge sadden, though the understanding shatter the dearest hopes—such has ever been the craving of the upward-striving mind in man.

So we have school after school, philosophy after philosophy, each one showing an aspect of truth, and ignoring, or even denying, the other aspects which are equally true. Nor is this all; as the age in which we are passes on from century to century, from millennium to millennium, knowledge becomes dimmer, spiritual insight becomes rarer, those who repeat far out-number those who know;

Experience can be an effective teacher. But, clearly, only some students listen to their teachers.

Self-serving bias has immediate and obvious consequences for our ability to learn from experience.

Experience is necessary for learning. But we process that experience in a biased way. This means that the very feedback you need to become a better decision-maker can interfere with your ability to learn good lessons from experience.

Seek out the outside view with an open mind. You'll be more likely to find out about the KICK ME sign on your back, the spinach in your teeth, and all the things you're having trouble seeing from your perspective. That will help you clear out the junk, which will improve your decisions.

Be a data sharer. That's what experts do. In fact, that's one of the reasons experts become experts. They understand that sharing data is the best way to move toward accuracy because it extracts insight from your listeners of the highest fidelity.

A lot of experience can be an excellent teacher. A single experience, not so much.

We can't just "absorb" experiences and expect to learn. As novelist and philosopher Aldous Huxley recognized, "Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him." There is a big difference between getting experience and becoming an expert. That difference lies in the ability to identify when the outcomes of our decisions have something to teach us and what that lesson might be.

Porque por encima de todas las razones sociales y psicológicas que pueda encontrar a lo que viví, hay una de la cual estoy totalmente segura: esas cosas me ocurrieron para que diera cuenta de ellas. Y quizás el verdadero objetivo de mi cuerpo, mis sensaciones y mis pensamientos se conviertan en escritura, es decir, en algo inteligible y general, y que mi experiencia pase a disolverse completamente en la cabeza y en la vida de otros.

Je voyais, de plus, que mon intuition avait dû être juste : c'est à la mi-mai que « quelque chose » s'est passé (de même que quelque chose a eu lieu vers la fin novembre), le détachant définitivement de moi.

Pero para qué escribir si no es para desenterrar cosas, hasta una sola, irreductible a explicaciones de toda suerte, psicológicas, sociológicas, algo que no sea el resultado de una idea preconcebida ni de una demostración, sino del relato, algo que salga de los repliegues escalonados del relato y que pueda ayudar a entender —a soportar— lo que sucede y lo que se hace.

Individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective.