Quotes About Insight

But it is very difficult to be learned; it seems as if people were worn out on the way to great thoughts, and can never enjoy them because they are too tired.

Who knows that about anybody?

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us. To

Stupefaction is not resignation; and it is stupefaction to remain in ignorance,–to shut up all the avenues by which the life of your fellow-men might become known to you.

It would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling, if we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it... Let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force, only changing its form, as forces do, and passing from pain into sympathy - the one poor word which includes all our best insight and our best love.

Just a month from this day, on the twentieth of September, 1850, I shall be sitting in this chair, in this study, at ten o' clock at night, longing to die, weary of incessant insight and foresight, without delusions and without hope.

One couldn't carry on life comfortably without a little blindness to the fact that everything has been said better than we can put it ourselves.

it came with the vibrations from a woman's glance.

three cuttle-fish sable, and a commentator rampant.

surely the only true knowledge of our fellow-man is that which enables us to feel with him—which gives us a fine ear for the heart-pulses that are beating under the mere clothes of circumstance and opinion.

without being obliged to dress itself in an elaborate costume of knowledge;

What was fresh to her mind was worn out to his; and such capacity of thought and feeling as had ever been stimulated in him by the general life of mankind had long shrunk to a sort of dried preparation, a lifeless embalmment of knowledge.

It's no mischief much while she's a little un; but an over-'cute woman's no better nor a long-tailed sheep,—she'll fetch none the bigger price for that.

If a man has a capacity for great thoughts, he is likely to overtake them before he is decrepit

the true seeing is within; and painting stares at you with an insistent imperfection.

it is art's duty to make us aware of realities which are not our own.

See the difference between the impression a man makes on you when you walk by his side in familiar talk, or look at him in his home, and the figure he makes when seen from a lofty historical level, or even in the eyes of a critical neighbour who thinks of him as an embodied system or opinion rather than as a man. Mr.

Who can tell what just criticisms Murr the Cat may be passing on us beings of wider speculation?

Without looking out of my window I could know the ways of heaven

I don't know why nobody told you How to unfold your love

Life is half spent before we know what it is.

Ancient writers sometimes meant what they said and occasionally even knew what they were talking about.

I never know where women are coming from.