Quotes about Insight

We are all at times unconscious prophets.

The best way in the world to deceive believers is to cloak a message in religious language and declare that it conveys some new insight from God.

This would be a great time in the world for some man to come along that knew something.

Faith is like radar which sees through the fog — the reality of things at a distance that the human eye cannot see.

Trifles make the sum of human things, and half our misery from our foibles springs.

Such a person can see without "pre-judice", that is, without judging in advance; he will judge only on the basis of what he has really seen for himself.

Maximus remained a child of his time, a disciple of his master. But the fact that he was able to develop his own basic insight, in spite of such influences, makes him one of the greatest thinkers in Christian intellectual history.

They try to reveal revelation to themselves. For the grace of the Holy Spirit never destroys the capabilities of nature. Just the opposite: it makes nature, which has been weakened by unnatural habit, mature and strong enough once again to function in a natural way and leads it upward toward insight into the divine.

Wonder—the enthusiastic ardor for the sublimity of being, for its worthiness to be an object of knowledge—promises to become the point of departure for genuine insight only where it has reached the stage in which the subject, overwhelmed by the object, has, as it were, fused into a single point or into nothing… like the movement of hope and love toward God, which is genuine and selfless only where it has assumed the attitude of pure worship of God for his own sake.

That insight, that God is to be found not in the crisis but in our response to the crisis, is the key to understanding one of the most important passages in the entire Bible.

Religion is not primarily a set of beliefs, a collection of prayers, or a series of rituals. Religion is first and foremost a way of seeing. It can't change the facts about the world we live in, but it can change the way we see those facts, and that in itself can often make a real difference.

Many biblical verses are like inkblot tests, revealing more about us than about the text in question.