Insight Quotes

“When you want wisdom and insight as badly as you want to breathe, it is then you shall have it.”
― Socrates

“There is one way to understand another culture. Living it. Move into it, ask to be tolerated as a guest, learn the language. At some point understanding may come. It will always be wordless. The moment you grasp what is foreign, you will lose the urge to explain it. To explain a phenomenon is to distance yourself from it.”
― Peter Høeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow

“Two things are to be remembered: that a man whose opinions and theories are worth studying may be presumed to have had some intelligence, but that no man is likely to have arrived at complete and final truth on any subject whatever. When an intelligent man expresses a view which seems to us obviously absurd, we should not attempt to prove that it is somehow true, but we should try to understand how it ever came toseemtrue. Thisexercise of historical and psychological imagination at once enlarges the scope of our thinking, and helps us to realize how foolish many of our own cherished prejudices will seem to an age which has a different temper of mind.”
― Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

“Hell didn't make me a monster. It just confirmed all my worst fears about myself.”
― Richard Kadrey, Devil Said Bang

“To fulfill your vision, you must have hindsight, insight and foresight.”
― Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

“The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detachment."

(A Qualified Farewell)”
― Raymond Chandler, The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler; and English Summer: A Gothic Romance

“Darkness had fallen upon everything for him; but just because of this darkness he felt that the one guiding clue in the darkness was his work, and he clutched it and clung to it with all his strength.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“It may be necessary to stand on the outside of one is to see things clearly.”
― Peter Høeg, Tales of the Night

“You can always tell the heart of man by what he do, and by what he don't do...”
― Steven J. Carroll, The Road to Jericho

“All my instincts are one way, and all the facts are the other, and I much fear that British juries have not yet attained that pitch of intelligence when they will give the preference to my theories over Lestrade's facts.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Norwood Builder - a Sherlock Holmes Short Story

“I never assume anything. I anticipate the possibilities and allow my imagination to create the future.”
― Lionel Suggs

“Strange combination, isn't it--gratitude and resentment? But this is the way I think. Actually, I think everybody thinks that way. Even the children of the humans who died long ago, I think they lived their lives holding similar contradictory thoughts about their parents. They were raised to learn about love and death, and they lived out their lives passing from the sunny spots to the shady spots of this world.”
― Otsuichi, Zoo

“If you talked to your friends the way you talk to your body, you’d have no friends left at all.”
― Marcia Hutchinson

“We humans are prone to err, and to err systematically, outrageously, and with utter confidence. We are also prone to hold our mistaken notions dear, protecting and nourishing them like our own children. We defend them at great cost. We surround ourselves with safe people, people who will appreciate our cherished views. We avoid those who suggest that our exalted ideas, our little emperors, have no clothes.”
― Valerie Tarico, Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light

“The more one loves, the heavier the meaning of death becomes, and the deeper the sense of loss.”
― Otsuichi, ZOO〈２〉

“It seems like all the time people are making themselves themselves, but they don't really know it. You can only have true visions when you look behind. A person can slide so fast into being something they never really intended. I wonder if you can truly resurrect your own self.”
― Elizabeth Berg

“...but I’d learned a long time ago that the worse things are, the more people lie about them.”
― Ripley Patton, Ghost Hand

“It seems to me that my whole life I've been standing on some tower or a pillbox or a trampoline, waving the names of writers, as if we needed rescue. And the first person I had to rescue was myself.”
― John Leonard, Reading for My Life: Writings, 1958-2008

“There are patterns in everything, in the whole of Nature, from the way the stars turn in the heavens to the whorl of a shell or the petals of a flower and the way leaves arrange themselves about a twig. There are forces, hidden forces. If I can discover what they are, how they operate, I will have my hands upon the levers of creation and can work them myself.”
― Celia Rees, The Fool's Girl

“Rebellion is all we'll be talking about. Love is revolution, a kind of coup d'état and cultural reprogramming in its own little way.”
― The Harvard Lampoon, The Hunger Pains: A Parody

“Sit on the train tracks and really believe a train won’t come; lie in your house when it is inflamed and tell yourself that it really isn’t burning; go ahead, neglect all sort of reason and continue to tell yourself that what you believe is the irrefutable truth and the day will come when you are wakened by a piercing whistle and scorching flames.”
― Dave Guerrero

“Love, far from being blind, is the very emotion that allows us to see.”
― Cristina Nehring, A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-first Century

“It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.”
― Edith Beale

“The human tendency toward confirmatory thinking - all of us are bias to seek information that fits what we already believe.”
― Valerie Tarico

“Too often, it is only love that makes us engaged enough, alert enough, alive enough to see”
― Cristina Nehring, A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-first Century