Quotes About Insight

Jordan B. Peterson

even the oldest and most familiar places retain an ineradicable capacity to surprise you.

A good therapist will tell you the truth about what he thinks. (That is not the same thing as telling you that what he thinks is the truth.) Then

I believe it was Jung who developed the most surgically wicked of psychoanalytic dicta: if you cannot understand why someone did something, look at the consequences—and infer the motivation. This is a psychological scalpel. It's not always a suitable instrument. It can cut too deeply, or in the wrong places. It

I believe it was Jung who developed the most surgically wicked of psychoanalytic dicta: if you cannot understand why someone did something, look at the consequences—and infer the motivation. This is a psychological scalpel. It's not always a suitable instrument. It can cut too deeply, or in the wrong places. It is, perhaps, a last-resort option. Nonetheless, there are times when its application proves enlightening.

Lo tienes que saber porque no es posible arreglar algo antes de saber que está roto.

More importantly, however, Horus has the will to see, along with the ability. This is courage itself: the refusal to shrink from what makes itself known, no matter how terrible it seems.

If you study art (and literature and the humanities), you do it so that you can familiarize yourself with the collected wisdom of our civilization. This is a very good idea—a veritable necessity—because people have been working out how to live for a long time. What they have produced is strange but also rich beyond comparison, so why not use it as a guide?

There's nothing that requires you to think more deeply than to write a book. (Interview with Chris Williamson)

If you listen, instead, without premature judgment, people will generally tell you everything they are thinking—and with very little deceit. People will tell you the most amazing, absurd, interesting things. Very few of your conversations will be boring. (You can in fact tell whether or not you are actually listening in this manner. If the conversation is boring, you probably aren't.)

How do you know but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way, Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five? —William Blake, from "A Memorable Fancy," The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

We only see what we aim at. The rest of the world (and that's most of it) is hidden. If we start aiming at something different—something like "I want my life to be better"—our minds will start presenting us with new information, derived from the previously hidden world, to aid us in that pursuit.

We process the unknown world from the bottom up. We encounter containers of information, so to speak, whose full import is by no means self-evident.

You are blind, because of what you desire. Perhaps what you really need is right in front of your eyes, but you cannot see it because of what you are currently aiming for.

Don't over-estimate your self-knowledge.

Nietzsche, for all his brilliance, allows himself anger, but does not perhaps sufficiently temper it with judgement. This is where Dostoevsky truly transcends Nietzsche, in my estimation—where Dostoevsky's great literature transcends Nietzsche's mere philosophy.

Sometimes you have to change the way you understand everything to properly understand a single something.

Every person is too complex to know themselves completely, and we all contain wisdom that we cannot comprehend.

Willful blindness is the refusal to know something that could be known.

You don't understand anything. You didn't even know that you were blind.

DA POR HECHO QUE LA PERSONA A LA QUE ESCUCHAS PUEDE SABER ALGO QUE TÚ NO SABES

Knowing mathematics is like wearing a pair of X-ray specs that reveal hidden structures underneath the messy and chaotic surface of the world.

One of the great joys of mathematics is the incontrovertible feeling that you've understood something the right way, all the way down to the bottom; it's a feeling I haven't experienced in any other sphere of mental life. And when you know how to do something the right way, it's hard-for some stubborn people, impossible-to make yourself explain it the wrong way.

Knowing mathematics is like wearing a pair of X-ray specs that reveal hidden structures underneath the messy and chaotic surface of the world. Math is a science of not being wrong about things, its techniques and habits hammered out by centuries of hard work and argument. With the tools of mathematics in hand, you can understand the world in a deeper, sounder, and more meaningful way.