Quotes About Insight

Un asno viejo sabe más que un potro. A. Perez. An old ass knows more than a young colt.

When a character wants to do one thing and I want him to do another, the character is usually right.

just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist.

Knowing a person isn't like knowing a string of facts. It's more like...a feeling.

It's extremely difficult to get things in perspective when you rub up against them every day.

Fiction, in a less direct way, will teach me, teach me things I would never learn had I not opened myself to them in story.

I'm surprised you didn't have her in white with half a dozen trainbearers," Louis said under his breath. Lena flashed him a smile as if he had said something warm and encouraging instead of sneering. Ivy was very quick on the uptake, she would notice if Lena glowered.

As anyone who has ever started with a high concept and then worked backward to find numbers to fit the theory knows, it is not unusual for the theory to make a lot of sense "in hindsight.

knowledge is power.

It takes experience to know what is a catastrophe (Richard Hughes, 'A High Wind in Jamaica')

There are no travellers now, only tourists. A traveller comes to see a reality that is there already. A tourist comes only to see a reality invented for him, in which he conspires.

Oh, it must be wonderful to be educated. What does it feel like?' 'It's like having an operation,' said Treece. 'You don't know you've had it until long after it's over.

Anyone who has ever scanned the bookshelves of a new girlfriend or boyfriend- or peeked inside his or her medicine cabinet- understands this implicitly; you can learn as much - or more - from one glance at a private space as you can from hours of exposure to a public face.

Often a sign of expertise is noticing what doesn't happen.

A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.

Did they know why they knew? Not at all. But the Knew!

general intelligence and practical intelligence are orthogonal: the presence of one doesn't imply the presence of the other.

Chris Langan] told me not long ago. I found if I go to bed with a question on my mind, all I have to do is concentrate on the question before I go to sleep and I virtually always have the answer in the morning. Sometimes I realize what the answer is because I dreamt the answer and I can remember it. Other times I just feel the answer, and I start typing and the answer emerges onto the page.

Re-reading is much underrated. I've read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold once every five years since I was 15. I only started to understand it the third time.

our power of thin-slicing and snap judgment are extraordinary.but even the giant computer in our unconscious need a moment to do its work.

Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade...It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head - even if in the end you conclude that someone else's head is not a place you're really like to be.

Practical intelligence is] practical in nature: that is, it's now knowledge for its own sake. It's knowledge that helps you read situations correctly and get what you want.

The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding.

he waits for the kid to decide whether to pull the gun up or simply to drop it - and all the while, even as he tracks the progress of the gun, he is also watching the kid's face, to see whether he is dangerous or simply frightened. is there a more beautiful example of a snap judgment? this is the gift of training and expertise - the ability to extract an enormous amount of meaningful information from the very thinnest slice of experience.