Insight Quotes

Friends are the family you choose (~ Nin/Ithilnin, Elven rogue).

~ Jess C. Scott

How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be as ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.

~ Margaret Atwood

A stumble may prevent a fall.

~ Thomas Fuller

You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.

~ Azar Nafisi

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.

~ Graham Greene

Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.

~ David Foster Wallace

Because it's much more pleasant to be obsessed over how the hero gets out of his predicament than it is over how I get out of mine.

~ Woody Allen

Anya looked upon Nin admirably. Having him as a partner-in-crime—if only on this one occasion, which she hoped would only be the start of something more—was more revitalizing than the cheap thrills of a cookie-cutter shallow, superficial romance, where the top priority was how beautiful a person was on the outside.

~ Jess C. Scott

Your strength will be found when you stop struggling with yourself, instead of thinking everyone is a struggle worth overcoming. Every obstacle in life is a lesson that teaches us, not others.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Each of us is shaped by the truth of our natures.Von to Silver

~ Adrian Phoenix

It is debatable whether blind faith is truly faith at all. Faith is the perceptive gray area where scientific facts meet an individual's experiential truths - the extreme of the former is left feeling in the dark whereas the latter is caught blinded by the light. By proper scientific method, it is intellectually dishonest for me to declare the existence of God with utmost certainty, but to my individual spirit, I would be intellectually dishonest to deny the existence of God even for a second. This leaves the best of both worlds, as the believer is called to be able to give reasons for his faith, a deviation from mere fantasy.

~ Criss Jami

You can always tell the heart of man by what he do, and by what he don't do...

~ Steven J. Carroll

Why is wisdom so fair? Why is beauty so wise?Because all else is temporary, while beauty and wisdom are the only real and constant aspects of truth that can be perceived by human means.And I don't mean the kind of surface beauty that fades with age, or the sort of shallow wisdom that gets lost in platitudes. is before you.True wisdom then steps in, to interpret, illuminate, and form a life-altering insight.

~ Vera Nazarian

The divine is in the present and you must be present to experience it. When you vacate the present and recede into your mind, allowing worries or work to remove you from the moment, you leave the plain upon which the divine dwells. When you are constantly under the anesthetic of digital distraction, you withdraw; you are no longer conscious, and therefore are in no fit state to commune with the sacred. If you wish to hear the answers you seek, you must be present to hear them. If you wish to partake in the insights there to be known, you must be present to receive them. If you wish to know the divine, you must be present to meet it. …you must be present.

~ L.m. Browning

Life doesn’t have a singular purpose and yet we try to pigeonhole this infinite gift by searching for a single meaning behind our existence. We hunger for meaning the way a starving man does food—convinced we will waste away without it. As though to experience what it is to be alive weren’t enough to justify drawing breath. Life is a multi-layered practice in exploration, self-definition, connection, and realization. The greatest challenge presented to us as human beings is to allow the infinite to be infinite; to accept that we will always be the student never the teacher, and allow the truths we’ve gathered to evolve because what we seek to understand is a living thing and is in a perpetual state of change. Humanity’s progression of understanding is open-ended. Anyone who professes mastery only shows their ignorance of the infinite procession of enlightenment of which they are a part. Each of us get to add a line into the coverless tome of understanding, which has no beginning and no end.

~ L.m. Browning

I would rather be able to appreciate things I cannot have than to have things I am not able to appreciate.

~ Elbert Hubbard

A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight andunderstanding.

~ Marshall Mcluhan

Any man filled with empathy is capable of gaining valuable insights on the human condition through the suffering of others. You do not need to suffer to know suffering, but you need empathy first to identify and feel the suffering of others around you.

~ Suzy Kassem

Those who understand will understand.

~ Wayne Gerard Trotman

Being rich or famous is the only profound thing that some people have ever said.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Seeing your own smallness is called insightHonoring your own tenderness is called strength

~ Jonathan Star

You have to learn where your weaknesses end and your strengths starts or you will spend your life focusing on all that falls apart.

~ Nikki Rowe

Love isn't about what you do for me. Love for me is where I see myself in relation to you.

~ Kierra C.t. Banks

How we give matters. If your thoughts & goals are selfish, than so be your fief. For it is through the heart that we prosper & through each other that we grow.

~ Robert Vanleeuwen

who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded and loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes

~ Allen Ginsberg

My father once told me that it’s not enough for a man to be lucky, that a guy has to know when that streak is on for him.

~ Henry Mosquera

I don’t care what Einstein said about God not playing dice; If he exists, he’s addicted to craps.

~ Henry Mosquera

People who are not blessed with the ability to make others laugh compensate for that by saying (or trying to say) things that are profound.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The greatest service, you can do, to the existence, is serving yourself. If you serve yourself and take care of, yourself, anything that comes out of you, will add meaning and beauty to life.

~ Roshan Sharma

All humans are sentient and sapient beings so they have the ability to perceive, think, and act using their knowledge, experience, insight, and conscience.

~ Debasish Mridha

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

~ Marcel Proust

I'm simply interested in what is going to happen next. I don't think I can control my life or my writing. Every other writer I know feels he is steering himself, and I don't have that feeling. I don't have that sort of control. I'm simply becoming. I'm startled that I became a writer.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Destroy your life; then put it back together.You'll get great material, meet some fascinating characters and – side benefit – the skills you develop will give you greater compassion, insight and range with the people you create on the page – or run into off of it.

~ Jerry Stahl

Never give advice unless you have walked the walk, because anybody can talk the talk.

~ Valencia Mackie

The most intriguing people you will encounter in this life are the people who had insights about you, that you didn't know about yourself.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Sounds travel through space long after their wave patterns have ceased to be detectable by the human ear: some cut right through the ionosphere and barrel on out into the cosmic heartland, while others bounce around, eventually being absorbed into the vibratory fields of earthly barriers, but in neither case does the energy succumb; it goes on forever - which is why we, each of us, should take pains to make sweet notes.

~ Tom Robbins

Marijuana enhances our mind in a way that enables us to take a different perspective from 'high up', to see and evaluate our own lives and the lives of others in a privileged way. Maybe this euphoric and elevating feeling of the ability to step outsidethe box and to look at life’s patterns from this high perspective is the inspiration behind the slang term “high” itself.

~ Sebastian Marincolo

The erruption of feelings & emotions that follows a near-death exerience, or any event that causes us to stop & look deeply at the reality of our lives, is ripe with the potential for insight & clarity.

~ Allan Lokos

We sometimes have a flash of understanding that amounts to the insight of genius, and yet it slowly withers, even in our hands - like a flower. The form remains, but the colours and the fragrance are gone.

~ Robert Musil

The movie Koyaanisqatsi shows non-commented time-lapse footage and focuses our attention on the very rhythm of our civilized modern life and nature. A marijuana high can do something for a user similar to what this time-lapse footage does. The enhancement of episodic memory and the acceleration of associative streams of memories can alter and enhance our recognition of patterns in our lives in various ways. If we are presented with quick associative chains of past experiences, we can see a pattern in a body of information that is usually not at once presented to our “inner eye” as such.

~ Sebastian Marincolo