Quotes About Insight

She can hear the crazy thoughts that are going through your mind before you can even find them.

I felt so stupid and young, and at the same time something was cracking open inside me, or maybe it was the world was cracking open to show me something really important underneath. I knew I was only seeing a tiny bit of it, but it was bigger than anything I'd ever seen or felt before.

In reality, every reader, while he is reading, is the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument, which he offers to the reader to permit him to discern what, without the book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself. The reader's recognition in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its truth.

Information like this had a life of its own, and once it entered her mind, she couldn't unknow or forget it.

She knew so much about what was happening in the world, even as she grew more isolated from it.

So of course I feel angry, I said, angrily. What do you expect? It was a stupid thing to ask. Yes, she agreed. It was a stupid thing to ask. I see that you're angry. I don't need to ask such a stupid thing to understand that. So why did you ask? Slowly she turned herself around, pivoting on her knees, until finally she was facing me. I asked for you, she said. For me? So you could hear the answer.

In reality, every reader, while he is reading, is the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument, which he offers to the reader to permit him to discern what, without the book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself. The reader's recognition in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its truth. —Marcel Proust, Le temps retrouvé

What I was learning, on those weekend walks, is how much you can find out about a person merely by watching what he eats. Food became my own private way of looking at the world.

I was slowly discovering that if you watched people as they ate, you could find out who they were.

In time, I came to understand that for people who really love it, food is a lens through which to view the world. For us, the way that people cook and eat, how they set their tables, and the utensils that they use all tell a story.

Only novels! Only some work in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language!

As in most cases when the truth becomes clear you wonder how you could ever have seen things differently.

most thumbed

This is natural: one must read Herodotus's book-and every great book-repeatedly; with each reading it will reveal another layer, previously overlooked themes, images, and meanings. For within every great book there are several others.

Es más útil entrar en un museo que hablar con cien políticos profesionales

Para entender hacia dónde vamos no hace falta fijarse en la política, sino en el arte

To understand our world, we must use a revolving globe and look at the earth from various vantage points.

Aki meg akarja érteni Afrikát, az olvasson Shakespeare-t.

The world contemplates the great spectacle of combat and death, which is difficult for it to imagine in the end, because the image of war is not communicable – not by the pen, or the voice, or the camera. War is a reality only to those stuck in its bloody, dreadful, filthy insides. To others it is pages in a book, pictures on a screen, nothing more.

It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand...

Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.

I opened my eyes and saw the real world, and I began to laugh, and i haven't stopped since.

An illusion can never be destroyed directly, and only by indirect means can it be radically removed... That is, one must approach from behind the person who is under an illusion.

Lord, give us weak eyes for things of little worth, and eyes clear-sighted in all of your truth.