Quotes About Insight

I've made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant, I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite.

To write tragedy, a man must feel tragedy. To feel tragedy, a man must be aware of the world in which he lives. Not only with his mind, but with his blood and sinews.

The question is how to arrive at your opinions and not what your opinions are.

The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

Some of the deepest truths are simple, when seen in the clearest light, and it takes a lucid intellect to grasp them so thoroughly that their simplicity can be brought into that light and offered to all, not just the privileged few.

We know too much and feel too little. At least, we feel too little of those creative emotions from which a good life springs.

To understand the actual world as it is, not as we should wish it to be, is the beginning of wisdom.

I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social. Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle; to allow moments of insight to give wisdom at more mundane times. Social: to see in imagination the society that is to be created, where individuals grow freely, and where hate and greed and envy die because there is nothing to nourish them. These things I believe, and the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken.

In general, I find that things that have happened to me out of doors have made a deeper impression than things that have happened indoors.

In a wise community a wise man would not seem foolish!

When people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid.

It has always been correct to praise Plato, but not to understand him.

The world needs wisdom as it has never needed it before; and if knowledge continues to increase, the world will need wisdom in the future even more than it does now.

To understand an age or a nation, we must understand its philosophy, and to understand its philosophy we must ourselves be in some degree philosophers.

Most people learn nothing from experience, except confirmation of their prejudices.

Knowledge, as opposed to fantasies of wish fulfilment, is difficult to come by.

proper task of philosophy is to remind ourselves of what we already know to be true:

Whoever wishes to see the world truly, to rise in thought above the tyranny of practical desires, must learn to overcome the difference of attitude towards past and future, and to survey the whole stream of time in one comprehensive vision.

The goods of the mind are at least as important as the goods of the body.

Most people learn nothing from experience except confirmation of their own prejudices.

Philosophic contemplation does not, in its widest survey, divide the universe into two hostile camps -- friends and foes, helpful and hostile, good and bad -- it views the whole impartially.

we can only infer it, and can never be directly and immediately aware of it.

Draw significant conclusions slowly.

compreender uma época ou uma nação devemos compreender sua filosofia e, para que compreendamos sua filosofia, temos de ser, até certo ponto, filósofos.