Quotes About Insight

The truth doesn't only excist of what you see.

That, darling, is the only thing that counts for someone to see more in you than you ever imagined was there.

The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know.

Much depends on asking the right question at the right time.

Comic discovery is paradox stated-scientific discovery is paradox resolved.

Complexity of thought is no measure of originality.

The problem of the planetary orbits had been hopelessly bogged down in its purely geometrical frame of reference, and when Kepler realized that he could not get it unstuck, he tore it out of that frame and removed it into the field of physics. This operation of removing a problem from its traditional context and placing it into a new one, looking at it through glasses of of a different colour as it were, has always seemed to me of the very essence of the creative process.

Discovery often means simply the uncovering of something which has always been there but was hidden from the eye by the blinkers of habit.

The moment of truth, the sudden emergence of a new insight, is an act of intuition. Such intuitions give the appearance of miraculous flashes, or short-circuits of reasoning. In fact they may be likened to an immersed chain, of which only the beginning and the end are visible above the surface of consciousness. The dive vanishes at one end of the chain and comes up at the other end, guided by invisible links.

Insight depends on the multi-dimensional analysis of the input in its various aspects, on extracting relevant messages from irrelevant noise, identifying patterns in the mosaic until it has become saturated, as it were, with meaning.

Without the hard little bits of marble which are called 'facts' or 'data' one cannot compose a mosaic; what matters, however, are not so much of the individual bits, but the successive patterns into which you arrange them, then break them up and rearrange them.

We are indeed a blind race,' wrote a contemporary scientist, 'and the next generation, blind to its own blindness, will be amazed at ours.

The HAHA reaction signals the collision of bisociated contexts, the AHA reaction signals their fusion, the AH reaction their juxtaposition.

Ask yourself if you're taking the time to see beyond the surface.

Empathy is not a feeling or sensation that suddenly washes over and engulfs us, but an intelligent, deeply respectful exploration of what lies beneath the surface of our world.

there are very few who can think, but every man wants to have an opinion; and what remains but to take it ready-made from others, instead of forming opinions for himself?

Reading is thinking with someone else's head instead of ones own.

The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.

Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.

Whatever torch we kindle, and whatever space it may illuminate, our horizon will always remain encircled by the depth of night.

Scholars are those who have read in books, but thinkers, men of genius, world-enlighteners, and reformers of the human race are those who have read directly in the book of the world.

Students and scholars of all kinds and of every age aim, as a rule, only at information, not insight. They make it a point of honour to have information about everything, every stone, plant, battle, or experiment and about all books, collectively and individually. It never occurs to them that information is merely a means to insight, but in itself is of little or no value.

The intellectual attainments of a man who thinks for himself resemble a fine painting, where the light and shade are correct, the tone sustained, the colour perfectly harmonised; it is true to life. On the other hand, the intellectual attainments of the mere man of learning are like a large palette, full of all sorts of colours, which at most are systematically arranged, but devoid of harmony, connection and meaning.

He who can see truly in the midst of general infatuation is like a man whose watch keeps good time, when all clocks in the town in which he lives are wrong. He alone knows the right time; what use is that to him?