Quotes About Insight

affectionate exasperated breath I knew

See?" said Boris, interrupting Vitya right in

Once, to my delight, I even saw him wearing pince-nez. (Later, I discovered that they weren't real prince-nez, but only had glass in them, and that his eyes were a good deal sharper than my own.)

every great painting is really a self-portrait

It's often pain tha makes us more aware of self

You don't need a point. The point is maybe that the point is too big to see or work round to on our own

A sententious and vulgar statement, certainly, but like many such gnomic vulgarities, it also contains a tiny splinter of truth.

If you wish to know the mind of a man, listen to his words." — JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

For better than thirty years, as a working historian, I have written on leaders I knew, such as Lyndon Johnson, and interviewed intimates of the Kennedy family and many who knew Franklin Roosevelt, a leader perhaps as indispensable in his way as was Lincoln to the social and political direction of the country. After living with the subject

One journalist complemented another that his article on a dispute, had made both sides see themselves as they are.

If we could first know where we are and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do and how to do it.

The more you read about a subject, he advised me, the more interesting it will seem.

we should look beyond our noses;

What is well-spoken must be yoked to what is well-thought. And such thought is the product of great labor, "the drudgery of the law.

Leaders in every field, Roosevelt later wrote, "need more than anything else to know human nature, to know the needs of the human soul; and they will find this nature and these needs set forth as nowhere else by the great imaginative writers, whether of prose or of poetry.

The incident suggests Roosevelt's developing sense of empathy. While Lincoln's seems to have been his by right of birth, Roosevelt slowly expanded his understanding of other people's points of view by going to places that a man of his background typically neither visited nor comprehended.

Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don't read a book out of its right time for you.

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty.

It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.

you can only value something if you've experienced it.

el libro está vivo y es poderoso, fructificador y capaz de promover el pensamiento y la discusión solamente cuando su forma, intencionalidad y plan no se comprenden, debido a que el momento de captar la forma, la intencionalidad y el plan coincide con el momento en que no queda ya nada por extraer.

A writer is the conscience of the world.

Writing about oneself, one is writing about others, since your problems, pains, pleasures, emotions—and your extraordinary and remarkable ideas—can't be yours alone.