Quotes About Insight

You have to live with the people to know their needs, and you have to live with God to know how to solve them.

It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.

I would rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong.

That's one thing can't be bought is brains. Only God can give brains. And they don't come off the wind either.

I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts.

I think that each of us inhabits a private world that others cannot see. The only difference between the writer and the reader is that the writer is able to dramatize that private world.

only then did I wake out of the book.

I think that each of us inhabits a private world that others cannot see. The only difference between the writer and the reader is that the writer is able to dramatise that private world.

Whenever I'm worried about anything,' said this guy Ben, 'I like to think about China. China has a population of like two billion people, and not one of them even remotely cares about whatever you think is so important.' I acknowledged that this was a great comfort.

I didn't care about truth; I cared about beauty. It took me many years--it took the experience of lived time--to realize that they really are the same thing.

What does literature do better than anything else? It provides a detailed representation of the inner experience of being alive in a given time and place.

What does it take to know a person? Time. It takes time.

Listen. Observe. Absorb.

Leland had once read an interview with Toni Morrison where the author said she regretted a third of her life. Leland's percentage was running a bit higher than that.

Leland had once read an interview with Toni Morrison where the author said she regretted a third of her life.

The thing I love best about reading fiction is that it gives you a way to connect the experiences of your own life to the larger world," Gigi says. "Don't you find that to be true?

The thing I love best about reading fiction is that it gives you a way to connect the experiences of your own life to the larger world

The minds of some human beings are as moles, grubbing in the earth for worms. They have no eyes to see God's sky with the stars in it.

One can … get trapped in one's own intellectual web.

The worst and best are both inclinedTo snap like vixens at the truth;But, O, beware the middle mindThat purrs and never shows a tooth!

Investigations, meditations, careers, relationships were much the same, he mused. They failed because no one thought to ask the right question.

Sometimes, Shan's father had told him, people can live eighty and ninety years and only briefly, once or twice at most, glimpse the true things of life, the things that are the essence of the planet and of mankind. Sometimes people died without ever seeing a true thing. But, he had assured Shan, you can always find true things if you just know where to look.

The more one understands the world...the harder it is to obtain Buddhahood." Dakpo to Shan

Hear the wind and you will know the wind. Wind blows, and the generations are its leaves. There was no higher praise than what was said of Confucius: He knows where the wind comes from.