Quotes About Insight

One who sees inaction in action and action in inaction- he is a wise man.

In this case, with mashed potatoes. "It's not about the potatoes!

I've never heard a teacher say something that was so completely, totally honest.

Through the years I came to realize that some of the most important insights I gained about myself came not from my friends but from my critics who, while playing rough, nevertheless alerted me to blind spots and inadequacies no one else had the courage to tell me about.

Realizing the extent to which people in the past struggled with circumstances that they scarcely understood is perhaps the most important insight flowing from historical study. To understand the past in all its complexity is to acquire historical wisdom and humility and indeed a tragic sense of life. A tragic sense does not mean a sad or pessimistic sense of life; it means a sense of the limitations of life.

Eventually all things are known. And few matter.

It is infinitely harder to ask questions in such a way that the audience is led not to the answers (the province of the demagogue) but to new perceptions.

It is my task always to know, particularly when I don't.

Con todo, ni siquiera yo puedo crear un personaje imaginado que resulte tan unidimensional como el lector corriente

Emma took everything in stride. Whether this was a sign of intelligence or of perfect indifference, Caroline could not fathom.

These books are a great deal harder to read than they were to write.

None of this is quite true but Leggett feels that to be excitingly right in general is better than to be dully accurate in particular.

She was intelligent but not clever; drawn

Every good mathematician is at least half a philosopher, and every good philosopher is at least half a mathematician.

Feed your head means read a book.

It's the individual's specific way of perceiving the world that swings the whole game in a different direction.

Judge the spirit of the prophecy before you judge the truth of the word.

There are small bits of useless knowledge which stick to one's brain like barnacles to a boat.

I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings.

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends.

One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father's library had not contained the right books.

A brain was only capable of what it could conceive, and it couldn't conceive what it had never experienced

For writers it is always said that the first twenty years of life contain the whole of experience – the rest is observation

It is always of interest to know what strikes another human being as remarkable.