Quotes About Insight

Attraverso le lacrime, che non sono un velo ma gocce per vedere con futuro. [La faccia delle nuvole]

The task is ... not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.

Well, now that is a question. I will only say that if I have acquired any wisdom from Big Kit, it is to live always with your eyes cast forward, to seek what will be, for the path behind can never be retaken.

You can't just trust to luck you have to really listen to what that character is telling you.

Your true knowledge comes from your own life experience.

When you have lived an experience that helps you understand, in an exaggerated way, the very thing you do not want, you also understand, in an exaggerated way, what you do want.

Just because we are dead does not make us smart.

Insight isn't informational; it is transformational. It is a knowing event. A change transpires. Understanding this distinction makes a big difference to all our knowing ventures. The moment of insight transforms the knower, the known, and the knowing.

We are epistemological beings: we live out an orientation to knowing, whether we "know" it or not.

If one knows, one cares; if one does not care, one does not know.

The well-known biblical story of the Magi who journey to find the Christ child and to bring gifts offers an emblematic story of knowing. They are not called wise men for nothing! nor is it a meaningless accident that we use the word epiphany in referring to a moment of insight. Epiphany is the name of the church season in which we celebrate God's revealing himself to these Gentiles--and to us.

If one cannot learn from the mistakes of others, one might as well become a Democrat.

It seems to me I write what I see, paint what I am.

When I ask him if he thinks there's a moral to his story, he says he's sure there must be, but doesn't know exactly what it is. "Maybe," he says after a short pause, "it's that this world is full of lizards, and even though there's nothing we can do about it, it is always helpful to find out how big they are.

Life gives me good advice, but sometimes I refuse to take it.

You'll never know what's happening inside the heads of other people.

Pay attention: what you need to know is usually in front of you. There are no secrets, just things people choose not to notice.

When a client asks the question "How do I boost my profits?" the first thing McKinsey does is take a step back and ask the question "Where do your profits come from?" The answer to this is not always obvious, even to people who have been in their particular business for years.

Whatever you're doing, chances are someone, somewhere has done something similar. Learn from others' successes and mistakes. Leverage your valuable time and don't reinvent the wheel!

The McKinsey problem-solving process begins with research. Before a team can construct an initial hypothesis, before it can disaggregate a problem into its components and uncover the key drivers, it has to have information.

one of my jobs at the start of an engagement was to search PDNet for anything that would shed light on our current project: comparable industries, comparable problems. Inevitably, any PDNet query produced a mountain of documents that I then had to wade through to find the few that might be relevant. Still, this long day's (and, as often as not, night's) work usually yielded something to point us in the right direction.

For a committed practitioner, forming a healthy relationship between meditation practice and the cultivation of awareness throughout the day is crucial. Otherwise, the momentum and pace of the rest of our life overwhelms whatever insights we are able to experience through formal meditation. Ideally,

every habit contains a kind of protective intelligence, a wisdom that somehow got frozen in a bygone time.

You grow up the day you have your first real laugh at yourself.