Quotes About Insight

One can, to an almost laughable degree, infer what a man's wife is like from his opinions about women in general.

this benefit from the Montesquieu of our own times, M. de Tocqueville.

Unlike baked beans, loaves of breads, or Fuji apples, books, once consumed, do not disappear.

Why read literature? Because it enriches life in ways that nothing else quite can. It makes us more human.

Now, I'm not the most observant of men, which is unfortunate, because I'm a private eye.

Henry Adams observes that John Hay has the ability to take the world as a whole rather than pulling it to pieces in criticism. He also observes that, in the routine of a stressful job, this perspective is challenged

My natural pessimism now works on Hay's natural pessimism until we are both quite out of our minds." Henry Adams

The most important things worth knowing are innate in you already.

Self-knowledge is the only basis of true knowledge.

To understand this Christmas record, you have to understand our ministry.

The short sayings of the wise and good men are of great value, like the dust of gold, or the sparks of diamonds.

How can what is not only dead and gone, but remote and sometimes alien, have any practical bearing on today's world? The answer is that, paradoxically, the value of the past lies precisely in what is different from our world. By giving us another vantage point, it enables us to look at our own circumstances with sharper vision, alert to the possibility that they might have been different, and that they will probably turn out differently in the future.

Knowledge once gained casts a light beyond its own immediate boundaries.

The brightest flashes in the world of thought are incomplete until they have been proved to have their counterparts in the world of fact.

Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.

The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.

Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.

It was the first Cirocco had seen her less than happy with what she'd seen through a telescope.

If you have to ask that question, you wouldn't understand the answer.

Yes, but what is it good for? What does it mean?" Her look was full of pity. "If you have to ask that question, you wouldn't understand the answer.

Even good opinions are worth very little unless we hold them in the broad, intelligent, and spacious way.

I wonder if the truth comes off people like an aura or an odor. You don't have to know them to know them, ya know?