Insight Quotes

Every book is a revolution. Books are our ticket out of boredom, despair, loneliness—but also ignorance.

~ Heidi Cullinan

Conviction is having the mindset to never doubt your self-understanding

~ Gino Norris

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 angers between women will not kill us if we can articulate them with precision, if we listen to the content of what is said with at least as much intensity as we defend ourselves agains the manner of saying. When we turn from anger we turn from insight, saying we will accept only the designs already known, deadly and safely familiar. I have tried to learn my anger's usefulness to me, as well as its limitations.

~ Audre Lorde

Inspiration is the result of moments of insight and a key component of internal “drive.

~ Pearl Zhu

There are no shortcuts to moral insight. Nature is not intrinsically anything that can offer comfort or solace in human terms -- if only because our species is such an insignificant latecomer in a world not constructed for us. So much the better. The answers to moral dilemmas are not lying out there, waiting to be discovered. They reside, like the kingdom of God, within us -- the most difficult and inaccessible spot for any discovery or consensus.

~ Stephen Jay Gould

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

Yeah... they tell you to work from the inside, which is perhaps their greatest deception of all...

~ Josh Burggraf

The lies they've convinced their eyes that they're seeing, will not mar the truth in my lens.

~ Justin K. Mcfarlane Beau

...but I’d learned a long time ago that the worse things are, the more people lie about them.

~ Ripley Patton

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

Idols aren't just stone statues. No, idols are the thoughts, desires, longings, and expectations that we worship in the place of the true God. Idols cause us to ignore the true God in search of what we think we need.

~ Elyse M. Fitzpatrick

Phædrus wrote a letter from India about a pilgrimage to holy Mount Kailas, the source of the Ganges and the abode of Shiva, high in the Himalayas, in the company of a holy man and his adherents.He never reached the mountain. After the third day he gave up, exhausted, and the pilgrimage went on without him. He said he had the physical strength but that physical strength wasn’t enough. He had the intellectual motivation but that wasn’t enough either. He didn’t think he had been arrogant but thought that he was undertaking the pilgrimage to broaden his experience, to gain understanding for himself. He was trying to use the mountain for his own purposes and the pilgrimage too. He regarded himself as the fixed entity, not the pilgrimage or the mountain, and thus wasn’t ready for it. He speculated that the other pilgrims, the ones who reached the mountain, probably sensed the holiness of the mountain so intensely that each footstep was an act of devotion, an act of submission to this holiness. The holiness of the mountain infused into their own spirits enabled them to endure far more than anything he, with his greater physical strength, could take.

~ Robert M. Pirsig

But before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself.

~ Harper Lee

Hell didn't make me a monster. It just confirmed all my worst fears about myself.

~ Richard Kadrey

Memories are the only moments when smiling & crying takes place at the same moment.

~ Sujish Kandampully

Hey you —All our fevered history won't instill insight,won't turn a body conscious,won't make that look in the eyes say yes, though there is nothingto solve even as each moment is an answer.

~ Claudia Rankine

As she rounded a corner one of her favourite songs came on the radio, and sunlight filtered through the trees the way it does with lace curtains, reminding her of her grandmother, and tears began to slide down her cheeks. Not for her grandmother, who was then still very much among the living, but because she felt an enveloping happiness to be alive, a joy made stronger by the certainty that someday it would all come to an end. It overwhelmed her, made her pull the car to the side of the road. Afterwards she felt a little foolish, and never spoke to anyone about it. Now, however, she knows she wasn’t being foolish. She realizes that for no particular reason she stumbled into the core of what it is to be human. It’s a rare gift to understand that your life is wondrous, and that it won’t last forever.

~ Steven Galloway

Working is prayer for the likes of us,” his master often said. “It’s the way we commune with God.”“Then how does He respond to us?” Jahan had once asked, way back when he was younger.“By giving us more work, of course.

~ Elif Shafak

The only people who really think they have seen something new are those whose experience is limited or whose vision can't penetrate beneath the surface of things. Because something is recent, they think it is new; they mistake now the for originality.

~ Warren W. Wiersbe

People have the power to change their perspective. They just get caught up in an endless cycle of foolish things that don’t matter.

~ Jamie Magee

Sometimes life holds more than people allow themselves to see. Such individuals may continue to live as though they are blind for eternities before realizing they were merely clamping their eyes shut.

~ Emily Herr

Sometimes it takes asking others for input to find out you have to ultimately look within yourself for the answers to the questions only you know the truth about...we choose the information we share. So, the person giving feedback is limited in view and their perspective will only keep your view of the situation distorted.

~ C. Nzingha Smith

You can't do that, it makes too much sense.

~ Daven Anderson

Once you understand who you are, you can become more of what you are.

~ Linda Deir

It was impossible to understand how brief it is. It seemed like youth would last so long, it would last forever. But it's just a blink.

~ Chris Pavone

It is true that we choose our life, but it’s also true that we can choose at any moment to change our path.

~ Jamie Magee

The benefit of such horizontal interactions - people sharing knowledge across fields - is that it encourages conceptual blending, which is an extremely important part of the insight process.

~ Jonah Lehrer

The overarching practice of letting go is also one of gaining resilience and insight.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Each day hands me a clean sheet of paper upon which to write. Therefore, I would be wise to write without ever having the need to erase.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Her mind is an unquiet one, words and thoughts and impulses constantly crashing into each other.

~ David Levithan

Life is beautiful and this earth is heaven, but your mind is capable enough to create hell for you, on this very earth, if you go on living your life, without understanding.

~ Roshan Sharma

Time and time again one has seen, even in people not particularly given to reflection, that the best way of finding a solution is to let one’s thoughts drift until the right moment comes to pounce, like a tiger taking its prey by surprise.

~ José Saramago

There's a fine line between career criminals and career professionals because most of us fall somewhere in between.

~ Samantha Leahy

Wonder—the enthusiastic ardor for the sublimity of being, for its worthiness to be an object of knowledge—promises to become the point of departure for genuine insight only where it has reached the stage in which the subject, overwhelmed by the object, has, as it were, fused into a single point or into nothing… like the movement of hope and love toward God, which is genuine and selfless only where it has assumed the attitude of pure worship of God for his own sake.

~ Hans Urs Von Balthasar

A creative person is one who has insight, who can see things nobody else has ever seen before, who hears things that nobody has heard before—then there is creativity.

~ Osho

Eyes that are blind have no way to tell the loveliness of faces and features, eyes with no pupils have no way to tell the beauty of colored and embroidered silks.

~ Zhuangzi

We can't expect a blind man to appreciate beautiful patterns or a deaf man to listen to bells and drums. And blindness and deafness are not confined to the body alone - the understanding has them, too.

~ Zhuangzi

Love, far from being blind, is the very emotion that allows us to see.

~ Cristina Nehring

Too often, it is only love that makes us engaged enough, alert enough, alive enough to see

~ Cristina Nehring