Quotes About Insight

I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to places I can't go.

Some things have to be believed to be seen. -Ralph Hodgson

It took the real thing to show you the size of your delusions.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened. —Winston Churchill

I don't understand how anyone can write if they don't use public transport. I earwig all the time.

You are lucky you are a writer because you will sort through this in ways other souls cannot; the bad part is you feel and see all of this in ways non-writers don't.

We write to expose the unexposed. Most human beings are dedicated to keeping that one door shut. But the writer's job is to see what's behind it, to see the bleak unspeakable stuff, and to turn the unspeakable into words - not just into any words but if we can, into rhythm and blues.

I could tell.

bug on the wall.

And the fact that millions of people use the term "morality" as a synonym for religious dogmatism, racism, sexism, or other failures of insight and compassion should not oblige us to merely accept their terminology until the end of time.

Cessation is believed to be a direct insight into an unconditioned reality (Pali: Nibb?na; Sanskrit: Nirvana) that lies behind all manifest phenomena.

We do not know what we intend to do until the intention itself arises

The human mind does, in fact, contain vast expanses that few of us ever discover.

And then came the insight that irrevocably transformed my sense of how good human life could be. I was feeling boundless love for one of my best friends, and I suddenly realized that if a stranger had walked through the door at that moment, he or she would have been fully included in this love. Love was at bottom impersonal—and deeper than any personal history could justify. Indeed, a transactional form of love—I love you because. . . —now made no sense at all.

The urge for retribution, therefore, seems to depend upon our not seeing the underlying causes of human behavior. Despite

Saint Augustine

Curiosity is straight fire for creativity. By exploring, you bring insights and inspiration to imagination.

I'm finding that the older I get, it's not that I learn new things, it's more like I find out how much of what I know is common knowledge.

The soul discerns what is true, independent of any tradition, institution, or book. Our religions are storehouses of secondhand insights, useful for inspiration but harmful when substituted for firsthand communion with the divine soul.  To the religiously devout, this may seem like a dangerous, revolutionary idea. But really, the truth of the soul is the oldest of revelations.

Knowledge squared is wisdom, and wisdom squared is virtue.

If you don't listen to your customers, someone else will.

My favorite buyer program is one called Eat What You Cook. Once a quarter, every buyer has to go out to a different store and act as manager for a couple of days in the department he or she buys merchandise for. I guarantee you that after they've eaten what they cooked enough times, these buyers don't load up too many Moon Pies to send to Wisconsin, or beach towels for Hiawatha, Kansas.

When your mind is quiet, when your mind is in silence, then the new arrives.

I wonder if I am too close to even see what is written on them. This close, everything is just a blurry mess.