Insightful Quotes

May all sentient beings be happy and free of suffering. ~ Gautama Buddha

Whenever two unbelievers quarrel, the may both say some very insightful things about the unsightly habits of the other.
The postmodernists are very good at pointing out the pretensions of the modernists. And the modernists are very good at pointing out the incoherence of the postmodernists. ~ Douglas Wilson

Women should be respected as well! Generally speaking, men are held in great esteem in all parts of the world, so why shouldn't women have their share? Soldiers and war heroes are honored and commemorated, explorers are granted immortal fame, martyrs are revered, but how many people look upon women too as soldiers? ... Women, who struggle and suffer pain to ensure the continuation of the human race, make much tougher and more courageous soldiers than all those big-mouthed freedom-fighting heroes put together! ~ Anne Frank

Why are there no windows in the toilets on aeroplanes? To protect you from the most dedicated perverts on the planet, hanging off the wing to get a peep? ~ Billy Connolly

Everything you now do is something you have chosen to do. Some people don't want to believe that. But if you're over age twenty-one, your life is what you're making of it. To change your life, you need to change your priorities ~ John C. Maxwell

Live dangerously and you live right. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Memory, instead of being a duplicate, always present before one's eyes, of the various events of one's life, is rather a void from which at odd moments a chance resemblance enables ones to resuscitate dead recollections, but even then, there are innumerable little details which have not fallen into that potential reservoir of memory, and which will remain for ever unverifiable. ~ Marcel Proust

[Patricia Highsmith] was a figure of contradictions: a lesbian who didn't particularly like women; a writer of the most insightful psychological novels who, at times, appeared bored by people; a misanthrope with a gentle, sweet nature. ~ Andrew Wilson

Forget about the great astounding victory. Focus on winning small victories every day, the final victory will come by itself ~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

Most inherent beauties are hidden, as are precious stones in the rocks ~ Soke Behzad Ahmadi

There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man's lack of faith in his true Self. ~ William James

Lowell's best friend was the heroically moustached art director of a tobacco magazine that published in the same building where Lowell worked at plumbing. His name was Harry Balmer, and despite the evidence of his moustache he was nervous, compulsive, and wracked with small fears. He looked his best from across a wide room; the closer you got to him, the more he seemed to fall apart into a mass of twitches and gnawed finernails and the clearer it became that this big, smart-looking moustache was a kind of bush he was trying to hide behind. ~ L.J. Davis

He saw it in her eyes. The anguish, the frustration. The terrible nothing that clawed inside and sought to smother her. She knew. It was there, inside. She had been broken.
Then she smiled. Oh, storms. She smiled anyway.
It was the single most beautiful thing he'd seen in his entire life. ~ Brandon Sanderson

If you do not manage power, it will burn you. ~ Ikechukwu Joseph

Now Speaker Gingrich says interesting and insightful things. He can explain them well. On many occasions he also says outrageous things that come from nowhere and he has a tendency to say them at exactly the time when they most undermine the conservative agenda. ~ Jim Talent

In order for something to be remembered, a story must be told. ~ N.T. Sexton

First begin between selves, set a definite time, at each at that time put down what the other is doing. Do this 20 days. You shall find you have the key to telepathy. ~ Edgar Cayce

Money is attracted to great ideas. ~ Robert G. Allen

If thy friends be of better quality than thyself, thou mayest be sure of two things; first, they will be more careful to keep thy counsel, because they have more to lose than thou hast; the second, they will esteem thee for thyself, and not for that which thou dost possess. ~ Walter Raleigh

Hilarious, insightful, and smart. A must-read for anyone who wears clothes. ~ Chelsea Handler

Perhaps the very best question that you can memorize and repeat, over and over, is, 'what is the most valuable use of my time right now?' ~ Brian Tracy

That's how the past juggles with your sanity: it makes the piranhas look like puppies. ~ Sean Aeon

In hindsight, I realized I could see into the future. Which is kind of like having premonitions of flashbacks. ~ Steven Wright

I suppose that's one of the ironies of life doing the wrong thing at the right moment. ~ Charlie Chaplin

Do not be embarrassed by your mistakes. Nothing can teach us better than our understanding of them. This is one of the best ways of self-education. ~ Thomas Carlyle

[Smart] is an elusive concept. There's a certain sharpness, an ability to absorb new facts. To ask an insightful question. To relate to domains that may not seem connected at first. A certain creativity that allows people to be effective. ~ Bill Gates

In any honest analysis, change is the basis of fear, the idea of something new, of some paradigm that is unfamiliar, that is beyond our experiences so competent that we cannot even truly predict where is will lead us. ~ R.A. Salvatore

Name one thing in this world that is not negotiable. ~ Walter White

When we are impatient, we are neither reverential nor reflective because we are too self-centered. Whereas faith and patience are companions, so are selfishness and impatience. It is so easy to be confrontive without being informative; so easy to be indignant without being intelligent; so easy to be impulsive without being insightful. It is so easy to command others when we are not in control of ourselves. ~ Neil A. Maxwell

No book or magazine article is for "everyone" so know your audience, then target them with your writing. ~ W. Terry Whalin

This is, indeed, an insightful observation. The Archbishop [Joseph L. Berardin] insists that the natural resemblance between Christ and his priests must not stop merely with the fact that they share a common masculinity. Our question is, 'Why must it BEGIN there?' If the faithful cannot see Christ in a male who exemplifies no godlike virtues - humility, gentleness, and self-effacing service - can they not see him in a female who does? Indeed, if the priest acts 'in persona Christi,' not 'in masculinitate Christi,' then 'NATURAL resemblance' between Christ and the priest, it would seem, does not entail PHYSICAL, that is SEXUAL resemblance, but a resemblance which is natural to the SPIRITUAL order with which the worshiping congregation has to do. And in this order there is neither male nor female, even as there is neither Jew nor Greek. We would, therefore, conclude that since the Word was made flesh, as the apostle John has declared him (John 1:14), we rightly heed those who, in the flesh, symbolize his presence as they speak and act in his name. But we see no reason to add to what the apostle said by insisting that the Word was made MALE flesh, for both male and female are equally bearers of the divine image. And since God created humankind in his image, male AND female, we can only conclude that women as well as men should be ordained to the priesthood, because femaleness, like maleness, is a fitting symbol (sacramental sign) of Deity. ~ Paul King Jewett

Short stories consume you faster. They're connected to brevity. With the short story, you are up against mortality. I know how tough they are as a form, but they're also a total joy. ~ Ali Smith

Everyone is ready to win, few are prepared. ~ Jim Garrett

At that moment, he was meaner and madder than he'd ever been, but mainly at himself, which is the worst kind of mean and mad to be, because the only thing to do about it is to take it out on someone else. ~ Victoria Forester

The empires of the future are the empires of the mind. ~ Winston S. Churchill

He who least likes courting favour, ought also least to think of resenting neglect; to feel wounded at being refused a distinction can only arise from an overweening appetite to have it. ~ Plutarch

People who focus on 'getting better' goals (also known as Personal Bests) as opposed to performance goals have a much better chance of success. ~ Jill Konrath

That is who Barack Obama is - a person of admirable character - and that is who he has remained for me over these last four years. I have not agreed with his every decision, but never once have I seen him break his cool, lose his composure, or abandon his insightful perspective - even during the most serious and/or absurd national disasters. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

I would turn the question around to people, especially those reporters who wrote some of those articles. Are you advocating our daughters shouldn't learn self-defense? Because that's what was taught at that rally. ~ Matt Shea

I make it a policy every election to only debate once, Democrats and Progressives. And I will say that the way that you have acted, very candidly, has been dishonorable in this entire campaign. ~ Matt Shea

It requires the greatest kind of wisdom, she thought, to know when to apply injustice. How can justice fall victim, even, to what is right? ~ Philip K. Dick

When you need advice- do you seek someone who has proven success or do you get advice from people who have never achieved what you desire? ~ Robert G. Allen

World Screen provides clear, insightful reporting on the most critical and complex issues of our industry. It combines local savvy with a global perspective, and it is an important source of information. ~ Gustavo Cisneros

One must not permit oneself excesses, except with persons whom one wishes soon to leave. ~ Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos De Laclos

A lot of music fans are still interested in insightful perspectives on music - maybe even more interested than ever, since everyone needs help making sense of the incredible variety of sounds that have sprung up in the wake of the Internet revolution. There's a lot of room for unique, qualified voices who can provide good reads. ~ Michael Azerrad

Life is just a mirror, and what you see out there, you must first see inside of you. ~ Wally Amos

In a world of dwindling light, you're a bonfire in the night. ~ Thomas Welsh

But calm is precisely what is absent from love's classroom. There is simply too much on the line. The "student" isn't merely a passing responsibility; he or she is a lifelong commitment. Failure will ruin existence. No wonder we may be prone to lose control and deliver cack-handed, hasty speeches which bear no faith in the legitimacy or even the nobility of the act of imparting advice. And no wonder, too, if we end up achieving the very opposite of our goals, because increasing levels of humiliation, anger, and threat have seldom hastened anyone's development. Few of us ever grow more reasonable or more insightful about our own characters for having had our self-esteem taken down a notch, our pride wounded, and our ego subjected to a succession of pointed insults. We simply grow defensive and brittle in the face of suggestions which sound like mean-minded and senseless assaults on our nature rather than caring attempts to address troublesome aspects of our personality. Had ~ Alain De Botton

It seems that I have spent my entire life trying to make life more rational and that it was all wasted effort. ~ A.J. Ayer

For me, the times I always regret are missed opportunities to say farewell to good people, to wish them long life and say to them in all sincerity, "You build and do not destroy; you sow goodwill and reap it; smiles bloom in the wake of your passing, and I will keep your kindness in trust and share it as occasion arises, so that your life will be a quenching draught of calm in a land of drought and stress." Too often I never get to say that when it should be said. Instead, I leave them with the equivalent of a "Later, dude!" only to discover there would be no later for us. ~ Kevin Hearne

If you want to enjoy life more fully, the trick is to teach yourself to live in the insightful mode more often. ~ Cheryl Richardson

The only way to be sure of catching a train is to miss the one before it. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

We are all self-made, but only the successful will admit it. ~ Earl Nightingale

A mere redrawing of borders, a change in governments, those things can never faze a Jewess with a good supply of hand wipes in her bag. ~ Michael Chabon

I think it's our obligation as filmmakers, as people investigating the world, to create the reality that is most insightful to the issues at hand. Here are human beings, like us, boasting about atrocities that should be unimaginable. ~ Joshua Oppenheimer

In the 10 or so years since e-sourcing technology first made its way into grocers' procurement departments, the results secured have been remarkable: frequent double-digit savings in both direct and indirect categories, new process efficiencies, higher procurement contract compliance, dramatically lower savings leakage - and the list goes on. ~ Steve Whiteman

Every now and then, I'm lucky enough to teach a kindergarten or first-grade class. Many of these children are natural-born scientists - although heavy on the wonder side and light on scepticism. They're curious, intellectually vigorous. Provocative and insightful questions bubble out of them. They exhibit enormous enthusiasm. I'm asked follow-up questions. They've never heard of the notion of a 'dumb question'.
But when I talk to high school seniors, I find something different. They memorize 'facts'. By and large, though, the joy of discovery, the life behind those facts, has gone out of them. They've lost much of the wonder, and gained very little scepticism. They're worried about asking 'dumb' questions; they're willing to accept inadequate answers; they don't pose follow-up questions; the room is awash with sidelong glances to judge, second-by-second, the approval of their peers. ~ Carl Sagan

The energies that make us act out of anger,fear,insecurity and doubt are extremely familiar. They are like an old,dark house we return to whenever things get too hard to handle.It feels risky to leave this house and see what's outside,yet we have to leave if we expect to be loved.

So we take the risk.We walk out into the light and offer ourselves to the beloved.This feels wonderful;it's like nothing we have imagined in our old,dark house.But when things get tough,we run back inside,we choose familiarity to fear and lovelessness over the vulnerability of love, until finally we feel safe enough to go back and try love again.

This is essentially the rhythm of every intimate relationship-risk and retreat. Over and over we repeat this rhythm,accepting love and pushing it away until finally something miraculous happiness. The old,dark house isn't necessary anymore.We look around, and we have a new house, a house of light. Where did it come from?How did we build it? It was built from the love of the heart.It has silently been weaving our higher and lower natures,blending fear,anger,survival and protection into the energies of devotion,trust,compassion and acceptance. ~ Deepak Chopra

Would there be no end to publishing, he wondered? Perhaps it would be a good idea if everyone just stopped writing for a couple of years, and allowed readers to catch up. ~ John Boyne

I think Direct Cinema's trying to be insightful by looking at reality in a very close way while, in fact, much more is staged than we like to think. In cinema verite, it's about trying to make something invisible visible - the role of fantasy and imagination in everyday life. ~ Joshua Oppenheimer

I know you are incredibly bright, because when you are not being a smartarse your comments in class are very insightful, and when you ARE being a smartarse you are witty and clever and you make me laugh even when I want to slap you. ~ Amy Harmon

Jo? Look at me. I'm about to do something really f**king stupid. When I do this, I need you to remember three words for me. Omni rosae spina." Thorn
"Every rose has its thorn?" Jo
"Good, you understand Latin. Yes. Commit those words to memory in the event I lose control. Okay?" Thorn ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

*And to keep her immune system strong she followed Dr. Goodhue's advice to abstain from alcohol, get plenty of fresh air and exercise, and consume a nourishing diet, low in salt. Page 144
"Fear is good. In the right degree it prevents us from making fools of ourselves. But in the wrong measure it prevents us from fully living. Fear is our boon companion but never our master.". Page 204
"I've come to believe that how we choose to live with pain, or injustice, or death ... Is the true measure of the Divine within us." ... "I used to wonder, why did God give children leprosy? Now I believe: God doesn't give anyone leprosy. He gives us, if we choose to use it, the spirit to live with leprosy, and with the imminence of death. Because it is in our own mortality that we are most Divine.". Page 307
**"With wonder and a growing absence of fear she realized, I am more than I was an hour ago.". Page 372
**my favorite! ~ Alan Brennert

Things done well and with a care, exempt themselves from fear. ~ William Shakespeare

He was ... blindingly beautiful, and wealthy, and my boss; all really good reasons why we were not suitable.
But, I really, really liked him. He was damn sexy and interesting and crazy smart and annoyingly insightful. I had to trust that there was something about me that he saw and liked enough to abandon his slamps and his Wendell lifestyle. I didn't like trusting, I didn't like setting greater than mild expectations, but I wanted to have faith in him. Call it wine, call it Quinn-sniff induced obscurity but I was too warm and fuzzy feeling to dwell on the scary side of strip poker. ~ Penny Reid

Love the moment. Flowers grow out of dark moments. Therefore, each moment is vital. It affects the whole. Life is a succession of such moments and to live each, is to succeed. ~ Corita Kent

I told her that I can't be doing with the Wonder part of these trips, but she said it should be the icing on the cake ... I've never liked wedding cake due to the amount of icing, but then imagine a wedding cake without it; just a dark, stodgy, horrible dry sponge. The icing covers up the mess, and that's how I feel about most of the Wonders. They use them to get people to visit a place that you probably wouldn't think about visiting. ~ Karl Pilkington

The more clarity you have, the more powerful your goals are. ~ Robert G. Allen

S. J. Keyser is a shrewd and insightful observer of academe. His experiences in three universities, Brandeis, UMass, and MIT, enrich his perspectives about the way universities work, and his exploration of the culture of MIT is brilliant. ~ Paul E. Gray

Books can be mirrors, too, offering a reflection of our worst selves for appraisal; lessons tucked between the pages, just waiting to be learned. ~ Alice Feeney

The results speak for themselves: Businesses that competitively sourced service contracts saved an average of about 22 percent. Even more impressive - nearly every e-auction delivered cost savings. ~ Brian Miller

I was voluntarily poor when I was in college and India, and I lived a pretty simple life when I was working. So I went from fairly poor, which was wonderful because I didn't have to worry about money, to being incredibly rich, when i also didn't have to worry about money.' - Steve Jobs ~ Walter Isaacson

Uncontrollable consumerism has become a watchword of our culture despite regular and compelling calls for its end. The United States has more malls than high schools; Americans spend more time shopping than reading ... Some of the most insightful writing about the American character over the nation's history has been about neither freedom nor democracy but about the crazed impulse to acquire things. ~ Anna Quindlen

Books are totally useless unless you take their advice. If you just keep reading them, thinking "that's so insightful! that changes everything," but never actually doing anything different, then pretty quickly the feeling will wear off and you'll start searching for another book to fill the void. ~ Aaron Swartz

Funny how you can forget that every family isn't like yours. ~ Patrick Ness

I think that our task as filmmakers is to create the most insightful reality given the most pressing questions. ~ Joshua Oppenheimer

Larry Grobel's interviews are informative and insightful without being pandering or intrusive. You get the sense at all times of both intelligence at work-the interviewee's and Grobel's-both inspired by the encounter. ~ David Duchovny

Dreams are self-created, but dreamers often do not understand the images that their own minds produce. Therein lays the essential paradox of dreams; dreams reveal that we all possess subconscious ability. Furthermore, our subconscious mind, as it is revealed through dreams, proves itself to be talented, artistic, insightful, perceptive and intelligent. ~ Charles McPhee

I find that the Amazon comments often are exceptionally shrewd and insightful, so I'm not going to diss them. But you don't really have any guarantees that what you're reading wasn't written out of friendship or spite. ~ Michael Dirda

Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings. ~ Steven Johnson

We are entrusting thousands of strangers with our innermost thoughts and feelings, and then we're expecting them to be careful with those feelings. As much as we want it to be, the Internet is not a safe space. It is not a place where we can lay our burdens down and heal. Why? Because there are too many people there who do not give an ounce of a shit about our well-being. They do not deserve our rawness, and they will not treat it with care. ~ Luvvie Ajayi

You cannot write your character until you know how he or she thinks, until you know what their philosophy is in the world that they occupy. ~ Don Roff

Ultimately, at the end of the day, you couldn't say you were better than the other person because you knew you had a secret. You knew you had cheated. ~ Cal Ripken, Jr.

Without the element of uncertainty, the bringing off of even, the greatest business triumph would be dull, routine, and eminently unsatisfying. ~ J. Paul Getty

Never hire someone who knows less than you do about what he's hired to do. ~ Malcolm Forbes

There is, after all, no pleasure like that given by a woman who really wants to see you. ~ Anthony Powell

When was the last time you heard an insightful, inspiring piece of oratory from an Australian political leader, an appeal to what is pure and true within humanity: a statement of belief backed by ideas for change betterment, a call to those immutable values wherein lie the potential greatness of people individually and collectively? Such exhortation, such leadership is lamentably scarce. ~ Michael Short

My most insightful comments have been forgotten while letting a whining dog out the door. ~ Jael Turner

The Visa bill has been almost manageable lately."
"Don't you think that maybe buying things was just her way of coping with her loneliness? Like when you both had to hide so much of yourselves; that couldn't have been easy."
"Hmm, that's quite insightful. Have you been watching Dr.Phil again? ~ Janine Caldwell

Those who have never seen themselves surrounded on all sides by the sea can never possess an idea of the world, and of their relation to it. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The phone rang. It was a familiar voice.

It was Alan Greenspan. Paul O'Neill had tried to stay in touch with people who had served under Gerald Ford, and he'd been reasonably conscientious about it. Alan Greenspan was the exception. In his case, the effort was constant and purposeful. When Greenspan was the chairman of Ford's Council of Economic Advisers, and O'Neill was number two at OMB, they had become a kind of team. Never social so much. They never talked about families or outside interests. It was all about ideas: Medicare financing or block grants - a concept that O'Neill basically invented to balance federal power and local autonomy - or what was really happening in the economy. It became clear that they thought well together. President Ford used to have them talk about various issues while he listened. After a while, each knew how the other's mind worked, the way married couples do.

In the past fifteen years, they'd made a point of meeting every few months. It could be in New York, or Washington, or Pittsburgh. They talked about everything, just as always. Greenspan, O'Neill told a friend, "doesn't have many people who don't want something from him, who will talk straight to him. So that's what we do together - straight talk."

O'Neill felt some straight talk coming in.

"Paul, I'll be blunt. We really need you down here," Greenspan said. "There is a real chance to make lasting changes. We could be a team at the key moment, t ~ Ron Suskind

Love is the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth ... Love is as love does. Love is an act of will
namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love. ~ M. Scott Peck

We must endure, Alyosha. That was the only thing she could say in response to my accounts of the ugliness and dreariness of life, of the suffering of the people - of everything against which I protested so vehemently. I was not made for endurance, and if occasionally I exhibited this virtue of cattle, wood, and stone, I did so only to test myself, to try my strength and my stability. Sometimes young people, in the foolishness of immaturity, or in envy of the strength of their elders, strive, even successfully, to lift weights that overtax their bones and muscles; in their vanity they attempt to cross themselves with two-pood weights, like mature athletes. I too did this, in the literal and figurative sense, physically and spiritually, and only good fortune kept me from injuring myself fatally or crippling myself for life.
For nothing cripples a person so dreadfully as endurance, as a humble submission to the forces of circumstance. ~ Maxim Gorky

Whoever educates himself and improves his own morals & character is superior to the man who tries to teach & train others. ~ Hazrat Ali Ibn Abu-Talib

Simplicity means the achievement of maximum effect with minimum means. ~ Koichi Kawana

Mindsight is a teachable skill at the heart of being empathic and insightful, moral and compassionate. ~ Daniel J. Siegel

What a man's mind can create, man's character can control. ~ Thomas A. Edison

Understand that relativity is everywhere, and that we view everything through its lens - rose-colored or otherwise. When you meet someone in a different country or city and it seems that you have magical connection, realize that the enchantment might be limited to the surrounding circumstances. ~ Dan Ariely

I liked being Doc Holliday. It's fun to be insightful and aristocratic, to stand up for your friend and make sacrifices for him. It was fun to be arrogant like he was and have the goods to back it up. He was a very noble character. Although, let's not forget, he did kill a lot of people. ~ Val Kilmer

Not everyone wants to take up meditation, but most people can feel an alignment with values like mutual respect, insightful investigation, listening to one another.
Meditation is a way to help those values become real in day-to-day life, helping people to understand themselves more and more and have a way to not get lost in old patterns. ~ Sharon Salzberg