Insight Quotes

“Friends are the family you choose (~ Nin/Ithilnin, Elven rogue).”
― Jess C Scott, The Other Side of Life

“Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“CHORONZON: I am a dire wolf, prey-stalking, lethal prowler.

MORPHEUS: I am a hunter, horse-mounted, wolf-stabbing.

CHORONZON: I am a horsefly, horse-stinging, hunter-throwing.

MORPHEUS: I am a spider, fly-consuming, eight legged.

CHORONZON: I am a snake, spider-devouring, posion-toothed.

MORPHEUS: I am an ox, snake-crushing, heavy-footed.

CHORONZON: I am an anthrax, butcher bacterium, warm-life destroying.

MORPHEUS: I am a world, space-floating, life-nurturing.

CHORONZON: I am a nova, all-exploding... planet-cremating.

MORPHEUS: I am the Universe -- all things encompassing, all life embracing.

CHORONZON: I am Anti-Life, the Beast of Judgment. I am the dark at the end of everything. The end of universes, gods, worlds... of everything. Sss. And what will you be then, Dreamlord?

MORPHEUS: I am hope.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman Vol. 1: Preludes & Nocturnes

“Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.”
― David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

“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, White Oleander

“Books, which we mistake for consolation, only add depth to our sorrow. ”
― Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red

“She could ask for anything, she thought dizzily, anything--an end to pain or world hunger or disease, or for peace on earth. But then again, perhaps these things weren't in the power of angels to grant, or they would already have been granted. And perhaps people were supposed to find these things for themselves.”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Glass

“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, The Complete Essays

“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, The Blind Assassin

“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, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“To know a man's library is, in some measure, to know a man's mind.”
― Geraldine Brooks, March

“They had only ever discussed books but what, in this life, is more personal than books?”
― Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

“Denna is a wild thing," I explained. "Like a hind or a summer storm. If a storm blows down your house, or breaks a tree, you don't say the storm was mean. It was cruel. It acted according to its nature and something unfortunately was hurt. The same is true of Denna.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

“Never give advice unless you have walked the walk, because anybody can talk the talk.”
― Valencia Mackie

“A stumble may prevent a fall.”
― Thomas Fuller

“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

“I would rather be able to appreciate things I cannot have than to have things I am not able to appreciate.”
― Elbert Hubbard

“Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding...”
― Brian Greene

“The voice says, maybe you don't go to hell for the things you do. Maybe you go to hell for the things you don't do. The things you don't finish.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby

“A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man

“Everyone knows that Africa is not reasonable place but if we can get
across that neither are we, we strengthen the bond with the continent.
People are not conscious beings, just ask any marketer. Irrationality
of the early explorers, irrationality of the new ones, irrationality
of the place we go into. What a great canvas we have to paint on...”
― Hendri Coetzee, Living The Best Day Ever

“Break the glass, please, and free us from all these damned rules, from needing to find an explanation for everything, from doing only what others approve of.”
― Paulo Coelho, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

“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

“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, Time Regained

“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

“If the glare of the public eye has become unbearable, our inner child may claim its rights and our bodily shadow might turn into our mental second self, become our anchor, make us stay grounded and grant us deepness and intensity. By retreating from the blaze of display into our substantial self, we gain rootedness, insight and new worldly wisdom. ("Not without my shadow")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Whether the bear beats the wolf or the wolf beats the bear, the rabbit always loses.”
― Robert Jordan, The Eye of the World

“As we walk down the steps to the unchartered rims of our life, we may become aware of unsuspected beacons we have ignored thus far, discover unsolved enigmas of our identity and so get insight into the undisclosed intricacies of our shared environment. ( "Only silence remained" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“In discovering the world, the "I" must meet otherness and converge with the "we." If we are prepared to leave our castle's safety, we can confront our sensitiveness with "outwardness", enhance our insight and tune up our pattern of life. (“Resilience”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“We have shut up long enough, and now is the time to speak out loud. Yesterday was the silence of the underdog, but today we recognize how unbearably colorless and tasteless our treadmill is. When we recognize things, we can come to comprehend them, and through that knowledge, we get insight into the reality of our needs, allowing our awareness to give birth to a clear vision to catalyze ultimate wisdom. ("The upper lip must never tremble" )”
― Erik Pevernagie