Quotes About Insight

The things that are important in life creep up on one unawared, one doesn't expect them, one hasn't given them shape in one's mind. One recognizes them, when they've appeared, that's all.

You have to read a book at the right time for you, and I am sure this cannot be insisted on too often, for it is the key to the enjoyment of literature.

This is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.

it seemed to her that she had acquired not virtues but a form of dementia

It frightens me that when I'm writing I seem to have some awful second sight, or something like it, an intuition of some kind; a kind of intelligence is at work that is much too painful to use in ordinary life; one couldn't live at all if one used it for living.

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

Algunos no saben distinguir el bien del mal ni siquiera cuando se les muestra.

If I have learned so much that I never expected, what more can I hope to learn and understand, providing I am patient, and do not allow myself to ask useless questions?

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.

I think novelists perform many useful tasks for their fellow citizens, but one of the most valuable is this: to enable us to see ourselves as others see us.

The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.

For that is of course what it means to read a novel and live in it for a while. You are viscerally inside someone else's reality. You feel and understand things you have not known before, and that is both scary and exhilarating. The world becomes more clear, reality more vivid, and your own experience larger.

Subject to intelligence, nothing is incalculable.

Self-knowledge is not sold on the Rialto. And if it were, few people would buy.

A man of over thirty might be held to be at the height of his powers, but not necessarily of his wisdom.

I see,' said Jerott slowly. 'You've thought it all out.' 'That's what I do,' said Lymond. 'I sit on my brood-patch and think.

It is not enough,' Robert Reid said, 'to offer justice. The laws of men, the laws of God himself are not enough unless you know the heart, the tongue, the brain, the gut of your people.

I once heard a man speak, who had understanding, and the promise of vision. He was called the Master of Culter.

But you do not know me,' Lymond said. 'Whereas I know you exceedingly well. You should be glad. I may well find it tedious; but you should have an extremely interesting journey.

Gorgeous I called him and that he is, Maeve: you'd be surprised. And nasty I called him, and that, Maeve, was a shrewd piece of insight, for nasty he certainly is. And a clever bastard, I called him.… Not to his face, dear. We're not all born to be heroes. But what he may not know, Maeve, is that I'm a clever bastard as well.

She looked,' said Alec Guthrie dryly, 'like a clever woman who was not unaware that five ill-dressed passers-by were displaying an unhealthy interest in her personal life.

I asked,' Sybilla said, 'because I have seen him like this before … once; when he elected to take everyone else's business in hand and return it to them correctly aligned, like an artist with a child's drawing.

Piero Strozzi and Francis Crawford looked at one another. 'A hint,' said Lymond, 'sufficeth for the wise, but a thousand speeches profit not the heedless. Did you hear what she said?' 'Unfortunately,' said Piero Strozzi, 'I heard what she said.