Insight Quotes - Page 34

• I am simply impressed by the unexpected insights which shower down on me when my job is to imagine, as contrasted with the woodenly familiar ideas which clutter my desk when my job is to tell the truth.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Jobs, Ideas, Unexpected

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• So here I am, my affections torn between a postal service that never feeds me but can tackle a challenge and one that gives me free tape and prompt service but won't help me out when I can't remember a street name. The lesson to draw from this, of course, is that when you move from one country to another you have to accept that there are some things that are better and some things worse, and there is nothing you can do about it. That may not be the profoundest of insights to take away from a morning's outing, but I did get a free doughnut as well, so on balance I guess I'm happy.

  Bill Bryson

  Country, Morning, Moving

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• At the age of twelve I had an attitude toward life that was to endure, that was to make me seek those areas of living that would keep it alive, that was to make me skeptical of everything while seeking everything, tolerant of all and yet critical. The spirit I had caught gave me insight into the suffering of others, made me gravitate toward those whose feelings were like my own, made me sit for hours while others told me of their lives, made me strangely tender and cruel, violent and peaceful.

  Richard Wright

  Attitude, Suffering Of Others, Peaceful

  Richard Wright (2017). “Black Boy”, p.99, Random House

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• Never allow anything to divert you from your insight into Jesus Christ. It is the true test of whether you are spiritual or not. To be unspiritual means that other things have a growing fascination for you. Since mine eyes have looked on Jesus, I’ve lost sight of all beside, So enchained my spirit’s vision, Gazing on the Crucified.

  Oswald Chambers

  Spiritual, Jesus, Mean

  Oswald Chambers (2010). “My Utmost for His Highest”, p.204, Discovery House

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• Seriousness is no more a guarantee of truth, insight, authenticity or probity, than humour is a guarantee of superficiality and stupidity.

  Stephen Fry

  Stupidity, Guarantees, Authenticity

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• To deal with things knowledge of things is needed. To deal with people, you need insight, sympathy. To deal with yourself, you need nothing. Be what you are--conscious being--and don't stray away from yourself.

  Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

  People, Needs, Conscious

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• Faith, hope, love, and insight are the highest achievements of human effort. They are found-given-by experience.

  Carl Jung

  Achievement, Effort, Faith Hope Love

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• There is the old catch-22 line that a mentally unstable person can't know, as per their illness, that they are unstable. But that was wrong. You can and do have the insight to see your own crazy.

  Harlan Coben

  Crazy, Lines, Illness

  Harlan Coben (2008). “Hold Tight”, p.166, Penguin

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• 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

  Heart, Enlightenment, Medusa

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• To be sane, he held, was either to be sedated by melancholy or activated by hysteria, two responses which were 'always and equally warranted for those of sound insight'. All others were irrational, merely symptoms of imaginations left idle, of memories out of work. And above these mundane responses, the only elevation allowable, the only valid transcendence, was a sardonic one: a bliss that annihilated the universe with jeers of dark joy, a mindful ecstasy. Anything else in the way of 'mysticism' was a sign of deviation or distraction, and a heresy to the obvious. (“The Medusa”)

  Thomas Ligotti

  Memories, Dark, Hysteria

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• Photographers tend not to photograph what they can’t see, which is the very reason one should try to attempt it. Otherwise we’re going to go on forever just photographing more faces and more rooms and more places. Photography has to transcend description. It has to go beyond description to bring insight into the subject, or reveal the subject, not as it looks, but how does it feel?

  Duane Michals

  Photography, Forever, Trying

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• You come by your style by learning what to leave out. At first you tend to overwrite—embellishment instead of insight. You either continue to write puerile bilge, or you change. In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.

  Billy Collins

  Writing, Voice, Style

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• [Biblical counseling] Must insist that the image of God is central to developing a solid view of personality; that our sinfulness, not how we've been sinned against, is our biggest problem; that forgiveness, not wholeness, is our greatest need; that repentance, not insight, is the dynamic in all real change.

  Dan B. Allender

  Real, Biblical, Views

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• The beauty of the ragamuffin gospel lies in the insight it offers into Jesus: the essential tenderness of His heart, His way of looking at the world, His mode of relating to you and me. 'If you really want to understand a man, don't just listen to what he says, but watch what he does.

  Brennan Manning

  Jesus, Lying, Heart

  Brennan Manning (2008). “The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out”, p.48, Multnomah

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• and while faith based on theological reasoning is today universally engaged in a bitter struggle with doubt and resistance from the prevailing brand of rationalism, it does seem that the naked fundamental experience itself, that primal seizure of mystic insight, stripped of religious concepts, perhaps no longer to be regarded as a religious experience at all, has undergone an immense expansion and now forms the soul of that complex irrationalism that haunts our era like a night bird lost in the dawn.

  Robert Musil

  Religious, Struggle, Night

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• 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

  Earthquakes, Shapes, Tornadoes

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• To cite the facts of history is to fall prey to 'moral equivalence,' or 'political correctness,' or 'the error of of atheism,' or one of the other misdeeds concocted to guard against the sins of understanding and insight into the real world.

  Noam Chomsky

  Real, Fall, Errors

  Noam Chomsky (1997). “World Orders, Old and New”, p.35, Pluto Press

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• Most people's intuitions are drowned out by folk sayings. We have a moment of real feeling or insight, and then we come up with a folk saying that captures the insight in a kind of wash. The intuition may be real and ripe, fresh with possibilities, but the folk saying is guaranteed to be a cliche, stale and self-contained.

  Anne Lamott

  Real, Self, People

  Anne Lamott (2007). “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”, p.113, Anchor

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• Many doctors are drawn to this profession (psychology) because they have an innate deficiency of insight into the motives, feelings and thoughts of others, a deficiency they hope to remedy by ingesting masses of data.

  William S. Burroughs

  Doctors, Data, Psychology

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

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• An artist is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. And an artist takes it personally.

  Seth Godin

  Art, Business, Creativity

  Seth Godin (2010). “Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?”, p.81, Penguin

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• Before examining this more carefully and investigating its consequences, I want to dwell for a moment in the contemplation of God, to ponder His attributes in me, to see, admire, and adore the beauty of His boundless light, insofar as my clouded insight allows. Believing that the supreme happiness of the other life consists wholly of the contemplation of divine greatness, I now find that through less perfect contemplation of the same sort I can gain the greatest joy available in this life.

  Rene Descartes

  Believe, Greatness, Light

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• We might be wise to follow the insight of the enraptured heart rather than the more cautious reasoning of the theological mind.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Wise, Heart, Mind

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• This, then, is the ultimate, that is only, consolation: simply that someone shares some of your own feelings and has made of these a work of art which you have the insight, sensitivity, and — like it or not — peculiar set of experiences to appreciate. Amazing thing to say, the consolation of horror in art is that it actually intensifies our panic, loudens it on the sounding-board of our horror-hollowed hearts, turns terror up full blast, all the while reaching for that perfect and deafening amplitude at which we may dance to the bizarre music of our own misery.

  Thomas Ligotti

  Art, Appreciate, Perfect

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• Because IQ tests favor memory skills and logic, overlooking artistic creativity, insight, resiliency, emotional reserves, sensory gifts, and life experience, they can't really predict success, let alone satisfaction.

  Diane Ackerman

  Memories, Creativity, Emotional

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• Fasting from any nourishment, activity, involvement or pursuit—for any season—sets the stage for God to appear. Fasting is not a tool to pry wisdom out of God's hands or to force needed insight about a decision. Fasting is not a tool for gaining discipline or developing piety (whatever that might be). Instead, fasting is the bulimic act of ridding ourselves of our fullness to attune our senses to the mysteries that swirl in and around us."—Dan B. Allender, PhD

  Dan B. Allender

  Hands, Discipline, Decision

  Dan B. Allender (2009). “To Be Told: Know Your Story, Shape Your Future”, p.186, WaterBrook

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