Quotes About Insight

If you are to become a writer you'll have to stop fooling with words," she explained. "It would be better to give up the notion of writing until you are better prepared. Now it's time to be living. I don't want to frighten you, but I would like to make you understand the import of what you think of attempting. You must not become a mere peddler of words. The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they say.

Little pyramids of truth he erected and after erecting knocked them down again that he might have the truths to erect other pyramids.

There is no use my not facing everything frankly. By facing everything frankly one gets everything quite cleared up.

The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they say.

the important thing to learn is to know what people think, not what they say

It would have been funny if I had been an observer and not a participant, an idea that gave me a disconcerting insight into gossip. As I walked beside the silent Tamara, I realized that despite how entertaining certain stories were, at the bottom of every item of gossip there was someone getting hurt.

Knowing the same tricks a con man knows is the best way to protect yourself from him. -Naru

I play with children so that I can learn from them.

It took me twenty years to hone my current definition of Gone.

You forget about all those things—you're just dominated by the vanishing-ness of things. It's just Gone, Gone, Gone. That, once again, leads to a figure-ground reversal. You are about to become Gone. Good, go with that.

unbalanced view of the nature of sensory experience.

a beginning meditator can sometimes get a taste of the stage that, according to the Visuddhimagga, immediately precedes enlightenment.

But in my experience as a teacher, enlightenment usually sneaks up on people. Sometimes they don't quite realize how enlightened they've become over time because they have gradually acclimatized to it.

I said, "Some people do know more than others. That contributes to the impression that someone, somewhere,knows the whole thing." [p. 38]

To learn what we fear is to learn who we are. Horror defies our boundaries and illuminates our souls.

An abundance of commonsense is called wisdom.

Learning is a lot like eating. It is not how much we eat that matters, but what really matters is how much we digest.

What eyes can tell you in a minute, a mouth will never say in a day.

sometimes we need someone else to open our eyes to what's really going on in our lives!

Truth only reveals itself when one gives up all preconceived ideas.

The true purpose of Zen is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes.

You do not say, "This is enlightenment," or "That is not right practice." Even in wrong practice, when you realize it and continue, there is right practice.

The trying to do something is in itself enlightenment. When we are in difficulty or distress, there we have enlightenment.

This is the mystery. When you understand one thing through and through, you understand everything. When you try to understand everything, you will not understand anything. The best way is to understand yourself, and then you will understand everything. So when you try hard to make your own way, you will help others, and you will be helped by others. Before you make your own way you cannot help anyone, and no one can help you. To