Quotes about Insight

On the most basic level, he simply could not link cause and effect.

Trump saw the world through the filter of other people's weaknesses.

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

The great authors were great readers, and one way to understand them is to read the books they read.

To agree without understanding is inane. To disagree without understanding is impudent.

Wonder is the beginning of wisdom in learning from books as well as from nature.

If a book is easy and fits nicely into all your language conventions and thought forms, then you probably will not grow much from reading it. It may be entertaining, but not enlarging to your understanding. It's the hard books that count. Raking is easy, but all you get is leaves; digging is hard, but you might find diamonds.

Wisdom is knowing when you can't be wise.

To write or read a poem is . . . to enter into a different kind of thought world from our normal patterns. A poem is not merely ordinary thought with a few turns and twiddles added on to make it pretty or memorable. A poem (a good poem, at least) uses its poetic form to probe deeper into human experience than ordinary speech or writing is usually able to do, to pull back a veil and allow the hearer or reader to sense other dimensions.

History is always a matter of trying to think into the minds of people who think differently from ourselves.

The radical insight of St. Paul into what it means to be human, and what it means to have the overwhelming love of God take hold of you, corresponds in quite an obvious way to what most people know about what makes someone more or less livable-with. And livable-with-ness, though of course it contains a large subjective element, is not a bad rule of thumb for what it might mean to be truly human.

A major part of our inquiry, then, must be to look at the emerging Christian movement and to ask: what caused it? Even if our eyewitnesses disagree in detail, something must have happened.