Insight Quotes

Animal spirits often will appear during the hours between dusk and dawn; also known as the “tween times”. They will always give you something. It may be just a simple pause within the chaos of life to remind you that there is more to life than the details of living it, working it and paying for it. It may be a shred of insight or a flash of recognition that comes to you in a fleeting thought or maybe in a dream in the tween times of your own mind.

~ Kate Mcgahan

The first and last weakness of his life, before him again. For a moment he felt himself blinded by his own memories; his own remembrances of the wits and wiles of Marian Halcombe that would steal into his thoughts; the sound of her laughter at his outrageous tales, the shadowed glance of distrust, the way her eyebrows would raise ever so slightly despite her resolution to seem disinterested in his foreign insights. She was the first woman he ventured to have complete equality in matching his tremendous cleverness.

~ Wilkie Collins

The spectacular thing about Johnny [von Neumann] was not his power as a mathematician, which was great, or his insight and his clarity, but his rapidity; he was very, very fast. And like the modern computer, which no longer bothers to retrieve the logarithm of 11 from its memory (but, instead, computes the logarithm of 11 each time it is needed), Johnny didn't bother to remember things. He computed them. You asked him a question, and if he didn't know the answer, he thought for three seconds and would produce and answer.

~ Paul R. Halmos

Emotion is ‘recognition’. When treasured moments are identified in the jungle of our personal history during a visual or aural encounter, we capture magic sparks from our past, arousing flashes of insight and revealing an inner flare. These instants of recognition may kindle enthralling emotion and fulfilling inspiration. (“Those journeys of love”)

~ Erik Pevernagie

Wake up wild one! Your mind is a cageless bird waiting to fly to uncharted lands. Like the phoenix, you'll rise again with renewed vigor, clarity, compassion and insight.

~ Melody Lee

Love gives insight, Maggie, and insight often gives foreboding. Listen to me, let me supply you with books; do let me see you sometimes, be your brother and teacher, as you said at Lorton. It is less wrong that you should see me than that you should be committing this long suicide.

~ George Eliot

Beauty is wasted on the self-absorbed.

~ Lorii Myers

I had a heady dream of loving her, as if she were an actress on a stage of my own making; and as the night wore on, my imaginings wandered into make-believe, and died beyond the tent of the mosquito net, where Vincent was snoring, and the African stars were shining in through our lone window, and nothing was quite real.

~ Colin Thubron

Not everything we experience can be explained by logic or science.

~ Linda Westphal

You don’t create your thoughts, but you choose your thoughts. To pick the right thoughts at a right time is what wisdom is all about.

~ Roshan Sharma

I know what you might think; that being alone is a sign of loneliness. But the way I see it, sometimes being alone serves as a period of insight as to who you really are. Think about it.

~ Lauren Lola

A tornado of thought is unleashed after each new insight. This in turn results in an earthquake of assumptions. These are natural disasters that re-shape the spirit.

~ Vera Nazarian

I imagined the lies the valedictorian was telling them right now. About the exciting future that lies ahead. I wish she'd tell them the truth: Half of you have gone as far in life as you're ever going to. Look around. It's all downhill from here. The rest of us will go a bit further, a steady job, a trip to Hawaii, or a move to Phoenix, Arizona, but out of fifteen hundred how many will do anything truly worthwhile, write a play, paint a painting that will hang in a gallery, find a cure for herpes? Two of us, maybe three? And how many will find true love? About the same. And enlightenment? Maybe one. The rest of us will make compromises, find excuses, someone or something to blame, and hold that over our hearts like a pendant on a chain.

~ Janet Fitch

He had also been demonstrative and intelligent from the very beginning, his questions startlingly insightful. She would watch him absorb a new idea and wonder what effect it would have on him, because, with Edgar, EVERYTHING came out, eventually, somehow. But the PROCESS – how he put together a story about the world’s workings – that was mysterious beyond all ken. In a way, she thought, it was the only disappointing thing about having a child. She’d imagined he would stay transparent to her, more PART of her, for so much longer. But despite the proximity of the daily work, Edgar had ceased long before to be an open book. A friend, yes. A son she loved, yes. But when it came to knowing his thoughts, Edgar could be opaque as a rock.

~ David Wroblewski

Dialogue with the self is the source of all insight and insight is the only thing that can change your life.

~ Oli Anderson

If I flew for you, you would still be standing.

~ Heather Nova

Of the obstacles we face while traversing life, the most challenging are often the ones we create from within and project onto our path.

~ Glenn A. Maltais

What others are doing or accomplishing is irrelevant to your growth.

~ Janet Gallagher Nestor

Some of the greatest insights we have ever experienced were those we least expected.

~ Michael Hyatt

At some point I hope to have grown sufficiently in both stature and wisdom to understand that I cannot deliver myself from myself, and that God alone can save me from me.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

I think it is best to know what you are and make peace with it.

~ Sarah Mccarry

By gazing inward the true reflection of the self is revealed.

~ Miranda J. Barrett

When you move something, you discover new meanings in it, Kristina thought, watching them.

~ Molly Gloss

[Mathematics] is security. Certainty. Truth. Beauty. Insight. Structure. Architecture. I see mathematics, the part of human knowledge that I call mathematics, as one thing—one great, glorious thing. Whether it is differential topology, or functional analysis, or homological algebra, it is all one thing. ... They are intimately interconnected, they are all facets of the same thing. That interconnection, that architecture, is secure truth and is beauty. That's what mathematics is to me.

~ Paul R. Halmos

Those of us who have overcome so many adversities from a very young age, are privileged to be able to communicate profound insights and advice to others, speaking from a place of genuine confidence and knowing.

~ Miya Yamanouchi

Failure is not the deterrent for the next try. Rather, it is information that empowers the next step.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

It’s true that if your religion failed to deliver a miracle, that a human sacrifice would certainly follow.Ah...quite. You are a man of acute insight.That’s not insight. That’s a personal guarantee.

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

I used to hammer away at the idea of simplicity.In both fiction and non-fiction, there's only one question and one answer. 'What happened?' the reader asks. 'This is what happened,' the writer responds. 'This...and this...and this, too.' Keep it simple. It's the only sure way home.

~ Stephen King

Thinking beyond the human condition often transcends us from it.

~ Gary Hopkins

In short, we derive support for our preferred conclusions by listening to the words that we put in the mouths of people who have already been preselected for their willingness to say what we want to hear.

~ Daniel M. Gilbert

The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds

~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Always remember that when a new moment, a new insight, hovers around you, choose the new because the old has not done anything for you, so what is the point of going back? Even if the new proves wrong, then too, choose the new. At least it will be a new adventure; you will come to know something.

~ Osho

The sinister, the terrible never deceive: the state in which they leave us is always one of enlightenment. And only this condition of vicious insight allows us a full grasp of the world, all things considered, just as a frigid melancholy grants us full possession of ourselves. We may hide from horror only in the heart of horror. (“The Medusa”)

~ Thomas Ligotti

I am afraid that our eyes are bigger than our stomachs, and that we have more curiosity than understanding. We grasp at everything, but catch nothing except wind.

~ Michel De Montaigne

Try to get inside the world of Homer and see what it would be like to think with his view of reality. Only then can you begin to judge it, because only then do you really understand it.

~ John Mark Reynolds

Sometimes the closer we got to a situation, the less clear it looked.

~ Wally Lamb

It may be necessary to stand on the outside of one is to see things clearly.

~ Peter Høeg

He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have been working.

~ Robert M. Pirsig

We take most everything at face value. Otherwise how could we get by? ~ The Museum of the Dearly Departed

~ Rebecca Makkai

I’d like to share with you a parable: the parable of Bob the Angel.A girl was walking down a darkly lit city street late at night. A man jumped out from the shadows and attacked her, suddenly she was suffocating and disoriented as hands clasped around her neck and the force of his attack started to push her down. She tried to yell as she struggled to pull his arms from her neck while she crumpled backwards to the ground, “God . . . help me!” The next thing she remembers—just as the fear consumed her, and right as she disappeared into the misery and despair of helplessness—was a loud crash and an explosion of glass which rained down upon her and her attacker. The assailant’s lifeless body was suspended above her, held from collapsing on her by an unknown force, and then pulled away from hovering over her and dropped onto the pavement beside her. She opened her eyes in the faint shadowy light, to see black matted hair and a long, black beard framing the eyes of a man. The smell of alcohol on his breath would have knocked her out if the adrenaline was not still trilling through her veins. There he stood, God’s angel, off-kilter and drunk, with a broken whiskey bottle in his hand. “You probably shouldn’t be walking through here this late at night,” was all he said as he turned away.“Wait! What’s your name?” she asked, still stunned half sitting up on the ground.All she heard as he walked away was his trailing voice calling, “Bob’s as good as any. . . .” An angel is a messenger, and sometimes we only want letters sent in white envelopes with beautiful gold print, when sometimes a simple “no” on the back of a gum wrapper is what we are offered. Every postcard from heaven does not come with a picture of the sunset there, nor should it. If it is an answer we want, an answer we will get. As far as pretty postcards, there are many others willing to send us that. If not harps and gold-tipped wings, what then is the mark of an angel? An answer which pierces your soul, and which inspires a question that invites you to look outside of yourself and up to God.

~ Michael Brent Jones