Quotes About Insight

Slow is the experience of all deep fountains: long have they to wait until they know what has fallen into their depths.

A time came when one rubbed one's eyes; one is still rubbing them today.

My wisdom has accumulated long like a cloud, it becomes stiller and darker. So does all wisdom which shall one day bear lightnings.-

If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you?

A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love.

If a man has a great deal to put in them, a day will have a hundred pockets.

Our treasure lies in the beehive of our knowledge. We are perpetually on the way thither, being by nature winged insects and honey gatherers of the mind.

I want, once and for all, not to know many things. Wisdom requires moderation in knowledge as in other things.

If you still experience the stars as something over you, you still don't have the eyes of a knower.

What is familiar is what we are used to; and what we are used to is most difficult to 'Know' - that is, to see as a problem; that is, to see as strange, as distant, as 'outside us'.

Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion: that is the doctrine of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much and, as it were, from an excess of possibilities does not get around to action. Not reflection, no—true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action, both in Hamlet and in the Dionysian man.

The discerning one walketh amongst men as amongst animals.

Insight into the origin of a work concerns the physiologists and vivisectionists of the spirit; never the aesthetic man, the artist!

I caught this insight on the way and quickly seized the rather poor words that were closest to hand to pin it down lest it fly away again. And now it has died of these arid words and shakes and flaps in them-- and I hardly know anymore when I look at it how I could ever have felt so happy when I caught this bird.

The more thoroughly a person understands life, the less he will mock, though in the end he might still mock the thoroughness of his understanding.

Ultimately, nobody can get more out of things, including books, than he already knows.

I myself, to be sure - I have as yet seen no great man. That which is great, the acutest eye is at present insensible to it. It is the kingdom of the populace.

There is something the child sees that he does not see; something the child hears that he does not hear; and this something is the most important thing of all. Because he does not understand it, his understanding is more childish than the child's and more simple than simplicity itself; in spite of the many clever wrinkles on his parchment face, and the masterly play of his fingers in unravelling the knots.

Siempre hay algo de locura en el amor; pero también siempre hay algo de razón en la locura.

We should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

People who comprehend a thing to its very depths rarely stay faithful to it forever. For they have brought its depths into the light of day: and in the depths there is always much that is unpleasant to see.

There is more wisdom in your body than in your best wisdom. And who then knows why your body needs precisely your best wisdom?

When the past speaks it always speaks as an oracle: only if you are an architect of the future and know the present will you understand it.

Why does man not see things? He is himself standing in the way: he conceals things.