Quotes About Insight

Reading is a technology for perspective-taking.

The realization of the perfect riposte three hours after the argument: hindser, stairwit, retrotort, afterism.

You can only really understand something when you know what it is not.

Max Roser's Our World in Data, Marian Tupy's HumanProgress, and Hans Rosling's Gapminder.

l'esprit de l'escalier

That is why when the stars are out they are visible but when the lights are out they are invisible and why it is that when I wind up my watch it starts, but when I wind up this poem it ends.

hándicaps racionales

The data are not entombed in dry reports but are displayed in gorgeous Web sites, particularly Max Roser's Our World in Data, Marian Tupy's HumanProgress, and Hans Rosling's Gapminder.

The linguist Noam Chomsky once suggested that our igno- rance can be divided into problems and mysteries. When we face a problem, we may not know its solution, but we have insight, increasing knowledge, and an inkling of what we are looking for. When we face a mystery, however, we can only stare in wonder and bewilderment, not knowing what an explanation would even look like.

there's nothing common about common sense.

The inability to set aside something that you know but that someone else does not know is such a pervasive affliction of the human mind that psychologists keep discovering related versions of it and giving it new names.

A list of ways in which we're stupid can't explain why we're so smart.

This new usage may fall deadborn from the innovator's lips or be welcomed into a segment of the community with open arms. The reception is partly capricious (as we shall see in chapter 6), but when a new combination does catch on, it could involve the later adopters' grasping the rationale with a stroke of insight recapitulating that of the original coiner, their dumbly memorizing the verb in that construction, or something in between.

Richard Feynman once wrote, "If you ever hear yourself saying, 'I think I understand this,' that means you don't." Though

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

I love trying things and discovering how I hate them.

Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.

Great joys make us love the world. Great sadnesses make us understand the world.

The love of truth lies at the root of much humor.

Whoever said that love is blind was dead wrong. Love is the only thing on this earth that lets us see each other with the remotest accuracy.

If you cannot judge a book by its cover, surely we should not judge an author by one book alone?

As I tell my intro creative writing students, after reading someone you love, wait at least an hour before starting to write.

Everything I know, I know because of love.

The kind of acting I love is when you watch and you discover what you think perhaps you weren't supposed to see: the chink in the armor.