Insight Quotes

“You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light.”
― Edward Abbey, The Best of Edward Abbey

“I used to say to my classes that the ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to study primitive people; to be psychoanalyzed; to have a religious conversion and get over it; to have a psychotic episode and get over it; or to have a love affair with an old Russian. And I stopped saying that when a little dancer in the front row put up her hand and said, 'Does he have to be old?”
― Margaret Mead

“Partings are the beginnings of new meetings.

Beginnings happen because there are endings.”
― Natsuki Takaya, Fruits Basket, Tome 22

“While focusing on the present moment, we soothe our minds and construe our intuition and inner wisdom. Our mindfulness allows us to access lower levels of awareness and gain insight into our reflections and emotions. At the same time, it lessens overthinking and anxiety. (“The infinite Wisdom of Meditation“)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Anne walked home very slowly in the moonlight. The evening had changed something for her. Life held a different meaning, a deeper purpose. On the surface it would go on just the same; but the deeps had been stirred. It must not be the same with her as with poor butterfly Ruby. When she came to the end of one life it must not be to face the next with the shrinking terror of something wholly different--something for which accustomed thought and ideal and aspiration had unfitted her. The little things of life, sweet and excellent in their place, must not be the things lived for; the highest must be sought and followed; the life of heaven must begin here on earth.

That goodnight in the garden was for all time. Anne never saw Ruby in life again.”
― Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of the Island

“I'm strong on the outside, not all the way through. I've never been perfect, but neither have you.”
― Chester Bennington

“Insight allows us to understand ourselves, value others, and comprehend the world. It forms the foundation for love and happiness. (“Love, Happiness, and Insight”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Insight sparks love to flourish as a magical alliance, not as a possession but as mutual respect. (“Love and Happiness and Insight”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Colonel Aubertin and his two colleagues sat on a park bench in the private garden of Dorset Square. Rougemont sat between his two superiors, pleased that for once the commandant appeared to have had an abstemious lunch. “Major Vane-Stewart was telling me the other day that this was once the site of the first important cricket ground in London, established by the same Thomas Lord who later built the famous ground that bears his name, a few miles to the north of us in St. John’s Wood. There is a plaque recording this fact in that shed over there. In the middle of the square.”
“Cricket.” Angers spat out the words with disgust. “A stupid game played by idiots. Only the English could invent such a boring name.”
― Mark Ellis, The French Spy

“Well, that's why smart people get tripped up with worry and fear. Worry...fear...is just a misuse of the creative imagination that has been placed in each of us. Because we are smart and creative, we imagine all the things that could happen, that might happen, that will happen if this or that happens. See what I mean?”
― Andy Andrews, The Noticer: Sometimes, All a Person Needs Is a Little Perspective

“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

“...your mind was seizing on something to try to make sense of the emotion... Can you see the power emotion has to distort our outlook? Makes you wonder, did you have a bad day, or did you make it a bad day?”
― Brandon Mull, Rise of the Evening Star

“His world closes in. The sky is endless no longer but pieced into squares of brick and bright cloths hanging down to dry. Underfoot, no longer stone but rubble, earth, the peelings and rotted scraps of the inedible. He smells the smoke of cooking fires, he hears men arguing and babies screaming like seagulls, he sees young women looking shyly down from high windows, exchanging glances. Now, he is no longer the watcher. Watched. Shouts echo in the dark between twisted walls and back alleys. A twisted smile in a doorway. A stranger’s voice. A stranger’s language.”
― Michael Tobert, Karna's Wheel

“Perhaps one day, all these conflicts will end, and it won't be because of great statesmen or churches or organisations like this one. It'll be because people have changed. They'll be like you, Puffin. More a mixture. So why not become a mongrel? It's healthy.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, When We Were Orphans

“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

“Intelligence is composed mostly of imagination, insight, things that have nothing to do with reason.”
― Vivienne Westwood

“Everything can change in a heartbeat; it can slip away in an instant. Everything you trust, and treasure, whatever brings you comfort, comes at a terrible cost. Health is temporary; money disappears. Safety is nothing big an illusion. 

So when the moment comes, and everything you depend upon changes, or perhaps someone you love disappears, or no longer loves you, must disaster follow? Or will you-somehow-adapt?”
― Margaret Overton

“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, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“அறிவதொவ்வொன்றும் அறியாமையையே..”
― Jeyamohan

“That which is not slightly distorted lacks sensible appeal; from which it follows that irregularity—that is to say, the unexpected, surprise and astonishment, are an essential part and characteristic of beauty.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“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, The Other Side of Life

“It isn’t the mountain ahead that wears you out; it is the grain of sand in your shoe.”
― Anonymous

“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

“Everyone is a fuckin' Napoleon.”
― Ani DiFranco

“Lathis rattle against steel railings. Drenched half-naked men, some with torn shirts, jump up and down waving their fists. Some chant ‘Bande Mataram,’ others ‘Mazdur ki jai,’ whatever is their preference, the motherland or the brotherhood of workers. The hammer and sickle, red but limp, flaps like a half-dead fish against the trunk of a banyan tree. The sky cries monsoon tears; it has been crying all night.”
― Michael Tobert, Karna's Wheel

“I mean that it's all right to go to bed with an asshole but don't ever have a baby with one.”
― David Gilmour, The Film Club: A True Story of a Father and Son

“It's much easier . . . to be on the verge of something than to actually be it. This would still take time.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“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 Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness

“Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows - images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs

“As libertines we seek to find and provide pleasures for others before pleasing ourselves. Libertines are never boorish, profane or blasphemous. We seek to lessen any cause for offence while maximizing pleasure. After our liaisons, our return is eagerly anticipated, and our departure is mourned. For most men the reverse is the case. In a world where most men are barely on before they are off again, we take the time and the care to be gentle lovers and build the sighs and the panting of true delight.”
― Harry F. MacDonald, Casanova and the Devil's Doorbell