Quotes about Insight

A window in Merton's mind let in that strange light of surprise in which we see for the first time things we have known all along.

The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.

Therefore the man of genius requires imagination, in order to see in things not what nature has actually formed, but what she endeavoured to form, yet did not bring about, because of the conflict of her forms with one another

I've never known any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.

reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with ones own

The more distinctly a man knows, the more intelligent he is, the more pain he has; the man who is gifted with genius suffers most of all.

We should rather consider the events, as they happen, with the same eye as we consider the printed word which we read, knowing full well that it was there before we read it.

Students, and learned persons of all sorts and every age, aim as a rule at acquiring information rather than insight. They pique themselves upon knowing about everything—stones, plants, battles, experiments, and all the books in existence. It never occurs to them that information is only a means of insight, and in itself of little or no value.

speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean—in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.

Being out of work brought a lot of new and starkly instructive experiences.

Anger is loaded with information and energy.

I want to write down everything I know about being afraid, but I'd probably never have enough time to write anything else.