Best Insight Quotes & Sayings

Larry Geller's Leaves of Elvis' Garden is by far the best book I have ever read about Elvis. It is emotional, revealing and spiritual, and offers the most amazing insight into the king. I highly recommend this dynamic book. — Uri Geller

The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. — Carl Sagan

It is commonly the case with technologies that you can get the best insight about how they work by watching them fail. — Neal Stephenson

The plain people, hereafter as in the past, will continue to make their own language, and the best that grammarians can do is to follow after it, haltingly, and not often with much insight into it. — H.L. Mencken

Does that mean that religious texts are worthless as guides to ethics? Of course not. They are magnificent sources of insight into human nature, and into the possibilities of ethical codes. Just as we should not be surprised to discover that ancient folk medicine has a great deal to teach modern hightech medicine, we should not be surprised if we find that these great religious texts hold versions of the very best ethical systems any human culture will ever devise. But, like folk medicine, we should test it all carefully, and take nothing whatever on faith. — Daniel C. Dennett

The best life could be best live by you. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Already known as one of America's best and wittiest poets, William Trowbridge has, in Ship of Fool, found the perfect vessel to convey his vision: comic, tender, wry, compassionate, full of insight and rueful understanding of what it means to carry on, cream pies in the face, pants falling down as the Green Weenie rampages through our foolish, beautiful lives. — Charles Harper Webb

I think a lot of people may have a unique insight or some idea that they feel could be a great solution for a particular problem, but for some reason never have a chance to try or never have the courage or maybe the self-doubt. Really, it's best just to remain naive and continue to work on things and see if people have the same problems. — Chad Hurley

Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries. — Carl Sagan

I do not hesitate to read. all good books in translations. What is really best in any book is translatable-any real insight or broad human sentiment. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The very best gift ... is that anyone can experience those unexpected twinkles of joy that make a magical moment. At these moments, you feel true, deep joy because of a great new insight, a beautiful prospect, or a glimpse into the radiance of another soul. They are the magic moments when life seems better than you ever realized. — Richard M. Eyre

...I'm trying to tell ya something bout my life,,maybe give me insight between black and white,,and the best thing you'd ever done for me is to help me take my life less seriously--it's only LIFE afterall... — Indigo Girls

I am honored to join the CBS Sports family to inspire, entertain and deliver insight on a platform with amazing women doing what we do best - talk sports. I am excited to have the opportunity to be a part of such a ground-breaking show. Yet we cannot do it alone. We hope to have the support of men and women' — Lisa Leslie

Economists have the correct insight that economics is a theory of choice, the key to the story is the variety of options and centralised political control limits the options. The best recipe is adaptive efficiency coping with novel uncertainty in a non-ergodic world, the maintenance of institutions which enable trial & error experiment to occur, and an effective means of eliminating unsuccessful solutions — Douglass North

New worlds need a Columbus, and the social Columbus is always a man with sufficient daring to stand by original convictions. Therefore I say that human progress is only made possible by not taking the world as we find it; and that he is the best friend of collective progress who is the most obedient not to collective convention, but to individual insight. — William James Dawson

I think it is best to know what you are and make peace with it. — Sarah McCarry

We find that in the absence of demonstrable truth, the best we can do is to exercise the greatest diligence, humility, insight, intelligence, and industry in trying to arrive at the nearest values to truth. I hope, of course, to argue convincingly that having done this, we have an inescapable duty to seek to inculcate others with these values. — William F. Buckley Jr.

Chapter 2: The Golden Rules of A+ Papers (What Makes a Good Paper Good) In the last chapter, we learned about lean manufacturing, and that taught us that one of the best ways to write a paper more quickly is to focus almost exclusively on the parts of a paper that will actually help you get a better grade. And really, there are a lot of things that makes an essay "good." We won't talk about every single little thing that your professor might be looking for. Every professor is different. However, I am going to try to give you some insight into what I used to look for as a college instructor. — Richard Glenn

To be No. 1 on the 'New York Times' best-seller list, well, that's alarming. Having been a stand-up comedian, I think it's surprising to a lot of people that I had the insight I had. — Steve Harvey

We tend to forget that unity is, at best, morally neutral and often a source of irrationality and groupthink. Rampaging mobs are unified. The Mafia is unified. Marauding barbarians bent on rape and pillage are unified. Meanwhile, civilized people have disagreements, and small-d democrats have arguments. Classical liberalism is based on this fundamental insight, which is why fascism was always antiliberal. Liberalism rejected the idea that unity is more valuable than individuality. For fascists and other leftists, meaning and authenticity are found in collective enterprises - of class, nation, or race - and the state is there to enforce that meaning on everyone without the hindrance of debate. — Jonah Goldberg

If we love our fellow humans, we cannot limit our insight and our love only to others as individuals ... We have to be political people, I would even say passionately involved political people, each of us in the way that best suits our own temperaments, our working lives, and our own capabilities. — Erich Fromm

To know what you want to say is not the best condition for writing a novel. Novels go happiest when you discover something you did not know you knew: an insight into one of your opaque characters, a metaphor that startles you ... a truth ... that used to elude you. — Norman Mailer

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. — Charles Stanley

The best vision is insight. — Malcolm Forbes

The irony of life is a twisted game; but my god you learn fast, the ins and outs of how to play your part the best you can. — Nikki Rowe

Perhaps, just perhaps, we can't read singular verses or chapters in a vacuum; perhaps we can't read letters written to specific people with specific situations in mind in a specific context and then apply them, broad-brush, to the whole of humanity or the church or even our own small selves. Perhaps we need wisdom, insight. We need the Holy Spirit. Perhaps we need Jesus as our best and clearest lens; we need all of Scripture, too. After all, Jesus is the Word of God incarnate. — Sarah Bessey

In the absence of data, we will always make up stories. In fact, the need to make up a story, especially when we are hurt, is part of our most primitive survival wiring. Mean making is in our biology, and our default is often to come up with a story that makes sense, feels familiar, and offers us insight into how best to self-protect. — Brene Brown

A phenomenon that gave rise to my first critical insight into the subtle ruse of power: the prevailing law threatened one with trouble, all to keep one out of trouble. Hence, I concluded that trouble is inevitable and the task, how best to make it, what best way to be in it. — Judith Butler

If the best way to learn to succeed is to fail as fast as possible, then the second-best way is to watch someone else fail as fast as possible. Watching someone else screw up is a kind of rehearsal for your own eventual downfall. A close observation of someone else's attempt to resolve a difficulty is a great way to acquire real-world insight into whether and when to deploy their method in your own times of trouble. — Cory Doctorow

Here and elsewhere we shall not obtain the best insight into things until we actually see them growing from the beginning. — Aristotle.

No, the secret is that there's no reward and we have to endure our characters and our natures as best we can, because no amount of experience or insight is going to rectify our deficiencies, our self-regard, or our cupidity. We have to learn that our desires do not find any real echo in the world. We have to accept that the people we love do not love us, or not in the way we hope. We have to accept betrayal and disloyalty, and, hardest of all, that someone is finer than we are in character or intelligence. — Sandor Marai

Managers of hospitals over the years have been increasingly recruited from outside the health service, and although their experience of running a supermarket chain might allow them to balance the books, it does not mean they have any insight into how a ward should be managed and patients best served. — Jo Brand

On the front cover of Newsweek reviews "A House for Mr. Biswas" as "a marvelous prose epic that matches the best 19th century novels for richness of comic insight and final, tragic power. — V.S. Naipaul

There is a beautiful and life-enhancing alternative outlook that offers insight, consolation, inspiration and meaning, which has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with the best, most generous, most sympathetic understanding of human reality. — A.C. Grayling

You Are Not Your Career.
Your ability to follow instructions is not the secret to your success.
You are hiding your best work, your best insight, and your best self from us every day.
We know how much you care, and it's a shame that the system works overtime to push you away from the people and the projects you care about.
The world does not owe you a living, but just when you needed it, it has opened the door
for you to make a difference.
It's too bad that so much time has been wasted, but it would be unforgivable to wait any longer.
You have the ability to contribute so much. We need you, now. — Seth Godin

We gain the insight to see ourselves through the friendships we make. They mirror us to ourselves. In them we see clearly what we do not have as well as what the world cannot do without. They do not judge us or condemn us or reject us. They hold us up while we grow, laughing and playing as we go. They bring us to the best of ourselves. "One's friends," George Santayana wrote, "are that part of the human race with which one can be human. — Joan D. Chittister

I had a neat stock of fixed opinions, but they dropped away one by one; and the further I get the less sure I am. I doubt if I have anything more for my present rule of life than following inclinations which do me and nobody else any harm, and actually give pleasure to those I love best. There, gentlemen, since you wanted to know how I was getting on, I have told you. Much good may it do you! I cannot explain further here. I perceive there is something wrong somewhere in our social formulas: what it is can only be discovered by men or women with greater insight than mine
if, indeed, they ever discover it
at least in our time. 'For who knoweth what is good for man in this life?
and who can tell a man what shall be after him under the sun? — Thomas Hardy

Reading the very best writers - let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy - is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight. — Harold Bloom

Creative thought in science is exactly this - not a mechanical collection on of facts and intuition, bias, and insight from other fields. Science, at its best, interposes human judgement and ingenuity upon all proceedings. It is, after all (although we sometimes forget it), practiced by humans. — Stephen Jay Gould

Anybody whose calling is to guide souls should have his own soul guided first, so that he knows what it means to deal with the human soul. Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness of other people. It would not help you very much to study books only, though it is indispensible too. But it would help you most to have a personal insight into the secrets of the human soul. Otherwise everything remains a clever intellectual trick, consisting of empty words and leading to empty talk. — C. G. Jung

There's a critical insight in all this for those of us who want to learn to be more influential. The best persuaders become the best through pre-suasion - the process of arranging for recipients to be receptive to a message before they encounter it. To persuade optimally, then, it's necessary to pre-suade optimally. But how?

In part, the answer involves an essential but poorly appreciated tenet of all communication: what we present first changes the way people experience what we present to them next. — Robert B. Cialdini

I am of the opinion that the appreciation and the desire for what is good takes more study and insight than does the understanding and test for the best music and art. — Laurance Rockefeller

One of the best introductions to the history and ideas of Calvinism, packed with insight and wisdom. — Alister E. McGrath

Depth is a big goal for all believers, because life as we know it makes no sense without it. Without it we're all lost souls, left to wander as we wonder if that's all there is. While with insight we find out very best self, with depth we find our very best God. Eventually wisdom comes, embraces us, and shows us both are really one and the same. — Karol Jackowski

They knew by instinct rather than by insight that this new expansion movement, in which "patriotism . . . is best expressed in money-making" (Huebbe-Schleiden) and the national flag is a "commercial asset" (Rhodes), could only destroy the political body of the nation-state. — Hannah Arendt

The genius is apparent from page one. . . . A seamless fusion of virtuosity and insight. . . . If William Wordsworth were alive today and writing cyberpunk, this is what he might write.

- David Farland
New York Times Best Seller
Lead judge for the world's largest genre writing competition — Milo Behr

We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness - curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids into truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then. But we don't do that. — John Taylor Gatto

It would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling if we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it
if we could return to the same blind loves, the same self-confident blame, the same light thoughts of human suffering, the same frivolous gossip over blighted human lives, the same feeble sense of the Unknown towards which we have sent forth irrepressible cries in our loneliness. Let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructable force, only changing its form, as forces do, and passing from pain into sympathy
the one poor word which includes all our best insight and our best love. — George Eliot

I'd long thought that a surfeit of sensitivity could be a killing thing, too much insight malignant in its own right. The best survivors
there are studies that show it
are those blessed with an inordinate ability to deny. And keep on marching. — Jonathan Kellerman

The very best [infographics] engender and facilitate an insight by visual means - allow us to grasp some relationship quickly and easily that otherwise would take many pages and illustrations and tables to convey. Insight seems to happen most often when data sets are crossed in the design of the piece - when we can quickly see the effects on something over time, for example, or view how factors like income, race, geography, or diet might affect other data. When that happens, there's an instant "Aha!" ... — David Byrne

The value of the student's question is supreme. The best initial response to a question is not to answer it, per se, but to validate it, protect it, support it, and make a
space for it. Like a blossom just emerging, a question is vulnerable and delicate. A
direct answer can extinguish a question if you're not careful. But if you nourish the
blossom, it will grow and give fruit in the form of insight as well as more questions.
In short, a question needs to be nurtured more than answered. It should be given
center stage, admired, relished, embraced, and sustained. — Curt Gabrielson

True happiness comes from gaining insight and growing into your best possible self. Otherwise all you're having is immediate gratification pleasure, which is fleeting and doesn't grow you as a person. — Aristotle.

If you can sustain the insight that people are doing the best they can
if you can maintain some faith that this is an insight
you're solid. If not, maybe you should pack it in. — Garret Keizer