Quotes About Insight

It's queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there had never been anything

An author writes only half the book. The rest is written by readers.

I am not such a fool as I look, quoth Plato to his disciples.

Conceive you - that ass!

There are things you find nothing about in books

It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention.

Now who art thou, that on the bench wouldst sit In judgment at a thousand miles away, With the short vision of a single span?

For if ye had been able to see all, No need there were for Mary to give birth;

It's queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there has never been anything like it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset.

Thou'rt wise, and knowest better than I speak. And as he is, who unwills what he willed, And by new thoughts doth his intention change, So that from his design he quite withdraws

A man may know so much of everything that he knows little of anything. This may sound paradoxical, but, nevertheless, experience proves its truth.

A man may know so much of everything that he knows little of anything.

Old people like to give good advice as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer set bad examples.

Reading is experience. A biography of any literary person ought to deal at length with what he read and when, for in some sense, we are what we read.

The English philosopher Michael Oakeshott notes that one of the signs of being cold today is that one knows what one doesn't have to know.

If the novel is an instrument of discovery, what it sets out to discover are bits of that still unsolvable and greatest of all great mysteries, human nature.

If you want to understand your mind, sit down and observe it.

Our mind becomes more spacious, more open, and happier as we move past our avoidance and denial to see what is true.

When we see deeply that all that is subject to arising is also subject to cessation, that whatever arises will also pass away, the mind becomes disenchanted. Becoming disenchanted, one becomes dispassionate. And through dispassion, the mind is liberated.

In meditation practice, we build the energy of awareness until it grows powerful enough to see entirely different levels of reality.

In the moment that we awaken from being lost in a thought or feeling or reaction, in that very moment we can recognize the empty, clear, skylike nature of awareness itself. In that moment of wakefulness, we get a glimpse of freedom. And instead of judging ourselves for all the times we do get lost, which happen again and again, we can delight in each moment of awakening.

Not Seeing Dukkha Is Dukkha

It is the truth that liberates, not your efforts to be free.

and the liberating insight into how suffering in our lives is born from ignorance and ends through wisdom.