Great Insight Quotes

The world breaks everyone or nearly everyone, of their childish illusions, assumptions and wishes, often painfully and afterwards due to the personal growth in practical experience, insight and the resulting wisdom many are strong at the broken places just like mended broken bones often are, and some people even have the great insight to be grateful for the purifying fire. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

I was reared in a pub - as a young fellow, serving in the pub I learnt far more there about human nature than I learnt in any university or school. I think it gave me a great insight into people. ~ Brian Cowen

While it may come as a profound surprise to those of us who are in the throes of an emotional or life crisis, the fact remains that the answer to virtually all of our problems resides within us already. It exist in the form of a vast reservoir of free-flowing energy that, when channeled to our muscles, can give us great strength and, when channeled to our brain, can give us great insight and understanding. ~ Bruce Lee

Every now and then we enter the presence of the numinous and deduce for an instant how we're formed, in what detail the force that infuses every petal might specifically run through us, wishing only to lure us into our full potential. ~ Mary Karr

Like many who are unable to play the game Ted had great insight into it. Perhaps being barred from success in a thing makes you overly perceptive of what makes success or failure in that thing, causes you to obsess on its technicalities and mysteries; whereas the gifted do not learn, they merely do, the less gifted stew, and ponder, and worry; they learn it the hard way and then they can teach it. The gifted can't teach what they never learned. ~ David Duchovny

The Lord can accomplish much more through prayer than any teacher can through teaching, and many times He will also bring great insight within that context. ~ Dutch Sheets

That end is an intuitive realization of a single great insight - that we and the world around are one, both part of a larger encompassing absolute. Our rational intellect merely obscures this truth, and consequently we must shut it off, if only for a moment. Rationality constrains our mind; intuition releases it. ~ Thomas Hoover

Bill Elliott has always been good at Pocono, and he's given me a lot of pointers. He's helping me learn how to get through the corners. He's got great insight on how to each corner is different and how I need to get through it. ~ Kasey Kahne

When I want to really get to know someone, I ask three questions. People's answers to these give me great insight into someone's heart. The questions are: What do you dream about? What do you sing about? What do you cry about? ~ John C. Maxwell

He told me that a German doctor named Wolff figured it out in the 1800s by studying X-rays of infants' hips as they transitioned from crawling to walking. "A whole new evolution of bone structure takes place to support the mechanical loads associated with walking," said Lang. "Wolff had the great insight that form follows function." Alas, Wolff did not have the great insight that cancer follows gratuitous X-raying with primitive nineteenth-century X-ray machines. ~ Mary Roach

I look upon the pleasure which we take in a garden as one of the most innocent delights in human life ... It gives us a great insight into the contrivance and wisdom of Nature, and suggests innumerable subjects for meditation. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Excessive analysis perpetuates emotional paralysis. Knowing our issues is not the same as healing our issues. In fact, knowing is often a willful act, entirely incongruent with the experience of surrender required to heal. I have known many people who could name their patterns and issues with great insight, but their actions didn't change a bit. The key to the transformation of challenging patterns and wounds is to heal them from the inside out. Not to analyze them, not to dissociate and dishonor them by calling them the 'pain body', not to watch them like an astronomer staring at a faraway planet through a telescope, but to jump right into the heart of them, encouraging their expression and release, stitching them into new possibilities with the thread of love. You want to transform your issues and patterns? Heal your heart. ~ Jeff Brown

I want babies. I think I'll be a great dad. ~ Oliver Hudson

I saw a huge steam roller,
It blotted out the sun.
The people all lay down, lay down;
They did not try to run.
My love and I, we looked amazed
Upon the gory mystery.
"Lie down, lie down!" the people cried.
"The great machine is history!"
My love and I, we ran away,
The engine did not find us.
We ran up to a mountain top,
Left history far behind us.
Perhaps we should have stayed and died,
But somehow we don't think so.
We went to see where history'd been,
And my, the dead did stink so. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

The world shown us in books, whether the books be confessed epics or professed gospels, or in codes, or in political orations, or in philosophic systems, is not the main world at all: it is only the self-consciousness of certain abnormal people who have the specific artistic talent and temperament. A serious matter this for you and me, because the man whose consciousness does not correspond to that of the majority is a madman; and the old habit of worshipping madmen is giving way to the new habit of locking them up. And since what we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the absolete fictitious for the contemporary real, education, as you no doubt observed at Oxford, destroys, by supplantation, every mind that is not strong enough to see through the imposture and to use the great Masters of Arts as what they really are and no more: that is, patentees of highly questionable methods of thinking, and manufacturers of highly questionable, and for the majority but half valid representations of life. The school boy who uses his Homer to throw at his fellow's head makes perhaps the safest and most rational use of him; and I observe with reassurance that you occasionally do the same, in your prime, with your Aristotle. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Nico: With great power, comes the great need to take a nap. ~ Rick Riordan

Pirate and Osbie Feel are leaning on their roof-ledge, a magnificent sunset across and up the winding river, the imperial serpant, crowds of factories, flats, parks, smoky spires and gables, incandescent sky casting downward across the miles of deep streets and roofs cluttering and sinuous river Thames a drastic strain of burnt orange, to remind a visitor of his mortal transience here, to seal or empty all the doors and windows in sight to his eyes that look only for a bit of company, a word or two in the street before he goes up to the soap-heavy smell of the rented room and the squares of coral sunset on the floor-boards - an antique light, self-absorbed, fuel consumed in the metered winter holocaust, the more distant shapes among the threads or sheets of smoke now perfect ash ruins of themselves, nearer windows, struck a moment by the sun, not reflecting at all but containing the same destroying light, this intense fading in which there is no promise of return, light that rusts the government cars at the curbsides, varnishes the last faces hurrying past the shops in the cold as if a vast siren had finally sounded, light that makes chilled untraveled canals of many streets, and that fills with the starlings of London, converging by millions to hazy stone pedestals, to emptying squares and a great collective sleep. They flow in rings, concentric rings on the radar screens. The operators call them 'angels. ~ Thomas Pynchon

I have clung To nothing, lov'd a nothing, nothing seen Or felt but a great dream! ~ John Keats

He realized that he needed a clear mind and clear emotion to draw and execute well from the beginning to the end of his work. We draw our most potent creativity from deep wells. That is not to say we cannot exercise energy as we execute. But we often mistake time pressures, stress and deadlines, alongside the cacophony of an always-on world, as the necessary stimuli to create great work. I believe great work comes from a place of stillness where one's focus is total on the action in hand, directed fully by the heart. ~ Alan Moore

An entrepreneurial economy is what made America great. People didn't come to settle the country several hundred years ago for all the good paying jobs. There weren't any. There was nothing but natural resources and opportunities. - Chris Lutz, Modular Career Design ~ Chris Lutz

Robert, have you seen those great black ants which are born with wings? They fly a day or two, then drop their wings and fall upon the ground to crawl for all their lives. I wonder when your son will drop his wings. Is it not strange, Robert, how, among men, this crawling is revered--how children tear at their wings, so they may indulge in this magnificent crawling?" "What makes boys grow to men?" Robert asked. "What circumstances rots out their wing roots?" "Why a great many never have wings, and some tear them off for themselves; some are sudden things and others very tedious. ~ John Steinbeck

People who have never run even a modest little business assert with great certainty and indignation that heads of multinational corporations are paid much more than they are worth. People who know nothing about medicine and nothing about economics unhesi. ~ Thomas Sowell

What a great teacher, a great parent, a great psychotherapist and a great coach have in common is a deep belief in the potential of the person with whom they are concerned. They relate to the person from their vision of his or her worth and value. ~ Nathaniel Branden

I don't think that you have any insight whatsoever into your capacity for good until you have some well-developed insight into your capacity for evil. ~ Jordan B. Peterson

Noboru tried to compare the corpse confronting the world so nakedly with what might have seemed the unsurpassably naked figures of his mother and the sailor; by comparison, they weren't naked enough. They were still swaddled in skin. Even that marvellous hom and the great wide world whose expanse it had limned couldn't possibly have penetrated as deeply as this ... the pumping of the bared heart placed the peeled kitten in direct and tingling contact with the kernel of the world. ~ Yukio Mishima

History affords us many instances of the ruin of states,
by the prosecution of measures ill suited to the temper and
genius of their people. The ordaining of laws in favor of one
part of the nation, to the prejudice and oppression of another, is certainly the most erroneous and mistaken policy ... These measures never fail to create great and violent jealousies and animosities between the people favored and the people oppressed; whence a total separation of affections, interests, political obligations, and all manner of connections, by which the whole state is weakened. ~ Benjamin Franklin

Ingmar Bergman had a great sense of humor, and he had a very special, characteristic laugh that you always recognized - if he went to watch a theater show, 'Ah! He is here tonight.' ~ Max Von Sydow

Some sports teams hate each other in the locker room and that's what makes them great. ~ Ira Kaplan

I have been very interested in the number of kids who have read the Sherlock Holmes books after reading the Mary Russell books. That's great. That's more or less how I rediscovered the Holmes books. ~ Laurie R. King

'Undertones of War' by Edmund Blunden seems to get less attention than the memoirs of Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, but it is a great book. ~ Pat Barker

Careful living and correct training methods aided me a great deal, but I would say straight punching was the foundation of all my success. ~ Jack Johnson

Italian football is great but for me, for the style of player I am, I found it too tactical, too slow. ~ Djibril Cisse

Television in the last few years has been where all the great writers are going. TV now is what indie film used to be. ~ Jeff Daniels

I guess Judd (Apatow) is my soul mate because we have a lot of hard times, and it's great at times, too. ~ Leslie Mann

As they say, with great power comes great responsibility."
"Are you screwin' with me, man?" Taylor asked bluntly. ~ David Estes

As a makeup artist, I learned quickly that the color of your lips affects the way a lipstick looks. If you see your friend wearing a great color, don't assume it will be right for you. ~ Bobbi Brown

I was willing to make us into a proper family; I was willing to put the time into it. I've sent your brother to fetch your mother, despite needing him elsewhere, in a bid to make you happy. But I don't have time to play with you any more. Your friends are not the only ones who understand you're replaceable. You're alive only because I permit it, and I am fast running out of patience with you. So tomorrow evening, you will present yourself in the Great Hall an hour after sunset. You will wear something very pretty, and your best smile. And we will dine together, companionably.You will not try to stab me. You will not spit at me, or slap me. You will behave with decorum. In short, sweetling, you will make yourself special to me, or I will remove you from my game board. I need your brother, and I need the philtresmith. But I don't need you. Bear that in mind. ~ Melinda Salisbury

A man is great not because he hasn't failed; a man is great because failure hasn't stopped him. ~ Confucius

I have been traveling to every corner of the great state of Florida. I've met some great people and we've had an honest discussion about the failures of Washington. ~ Adam Hasner

One of the most painful moments in a person's life probably comes with the insight that an age has been reached when there is more to look back on than ahead. And ~ Fredrik Backman

I can't believe this heat," Abbey said, taking her tunic and pulling it over her head. Underneath was a form-fitting top that showed a figure unaccustomed to idleness or excess. Kip stared at her the way he had at the shiney curves of the steel horse back in the garage. "Can you imagine what it must have been like hundreds of years ago, when weather changed just a few times a year?" she said, wiping sweat from her brow with the back of her hand. "Yeah, it must have looked great," Kip said. "What do you mean looked great?" Abbey said, turning her eye on Kip. "Must have been great, like you said," he corrected. ~ Shawn Keenan

Historians usually focus their attention on the past of countries that still exist, writing hundreds and thousands of books on British history, French history, German history, Russian history, American history, Chinese history, Indian history, Brazilian history or whatever. Whether consciously or not, they are seeking the roots of the present, thereby putting themselves in danger of reading history backwards. As soon as great powers arise, whether the United States in the twentieth century or China in the twenty-first, the call goes out for offerings on American History or Chinese History, and siren voices sing that today's important countries are also those whose past is most deserving of examination, that a more comprehensive spectrum of historical knowledge can be safely ignored. ~ Norman Davies

Ambition is the incentive that makes purpose GREAT and ACHIEVEMENT greater! ~ Orison Swett Marden