Quotes About Insight

Nurse Leatheran has been giving me valuable information about the various members of the expedition. Incidentally I have learnt a good deal - about the victim. And the victim, mademoiselle, is very often the clue to the mystery.

Women observe subconsciously a thousand little details ... and they call the result intuition.

It was so hard to get an idea of people you had never seen. You had to rely on other people's judgment. ... Other people's impressions were no good to you. They might be just as true as yours but you couldn't act on them. You couldn't, as it were, use another person's angle of attack.

We all have the little grey cells. And so few of us know how to use them.

Meanwhile we have learnt something, and to know is to be prepared.

É il cervello, le piccole cellule grigie» si batté una mano sulla fronte, «la cosa su cui bisogna basarsi. I sensi inducono in errore. Bisogna cercare la verità dal di dentro, non dal di fuori.»

Human nature, dear, is very much the same everywhere. It is more difficult to observe it closely in a city, that is all.

A woman would know all right about her own husband.

What I think is a different matter. Maybe I think some rather curious things—but until thinking's got you somewhere it's no use talking about it.

The things she said seemed to have very little relation to the last thing she had said a minute before. She was the sort of person, Tommy thought, who might know a great deal more than she chose to reveal.

With more insight into the English character, I poured out a stiff whisky and soda and placed it in front of the gloomy inspector.

But, mind you, very few people would understand that point of view. Most people, you see, haven't got any imagination

It's often when you're talking over things that you seem to see your way clear. Your mind gets made up for you sometimes without your knowing how it's happened. Talking leads to a lot of things one way or another.

Do you know what I've been thinking, Tommy?" "It's impossible to say," replied her husband. "You think of so many things, and you think of them all at once.

He has neither what I call the outward vision (seeing details all around you what is called an observant person) nor the inner vision--concentration, the focusing of the mind on one object. He has a purposefully limited vision. He sees only what blends and harmonises with the bent of his mind.

Curious thing, rooms. Tell you quite a lot about the people who live in them." I agreed and he went on. "Curious the people who marry each other, too, isn't it?

people are capable of surprising one frightfully. One gets an idea of them into one's head, and sometimes it's absolutely wrong. Not always - but sometimes.

Everybody always knows something," said Adam. "Even if it's something they don't know they know.

Miss Marple made the kind of noise that would once have been written down as 'tut-tut'.

Poirot closed his eyes. What he perceived mentally was a kaleidoscope, no more, no less. Pieces of cut-up scarves and rucksacks, cookery books, lipsticks, bath salts; names and thumbnail sketches of odd students. Nowhere was there cohesion or form. Unrelated incidents and people whirled round in space. But Poirot knew quite well that somehow and somewhere there must be a pattern . . . The question was where to start.. . . .

Every man should have aunts. They illustrate the triumph of guess work over logic.

what is often called an intuition is really an impression based on logical deduction or experience.

So many things are difficult," said Miss Marple. It was a useful phrase which she used often.

What made Lady Angkatell dangerous, he thought, was the fact that those intuitive, wild guesses of hers might be often right. With a careless (seemingly careless?) word she built up a picture - and if parts of the picture was right, wouldn't you, in spite of yourself, believe in the other half of the picture?...