Insightful Life Quotes & Sayings

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

PLEASE don't ever think that you can't get out of the rut you may be in or think you can't take your life to a whole new level.. Anything is possible when you have a path, a plan and a desire to take action.. — Dean Graziosi

Your life must focus on the maximization of objectivity. — Charlie Munger

You can continue to cry over the same pain & complain about the same situations or you can expand your mind and you can grow. Maybe im not alone when I say, sometimes we all get a little confused and feel like we owe it to the people and places to try harder when in reality, most of the time lessons become lifelong if we don't learn the art of peaceful detachment early in the game. — Nikki Rowe

She was still there inside me now, just as she always was: a life put on hold, a memory I didn't know how to handle. — Banana Yoshimoto

All things are already complete in us. There is no greater delight than to be conscious of right within us. If one strives to treat others as he would be treated by them, he shall not fail to come near the perfect life. — Mencius

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

The deeper you surrender to existence, life, nature, the more loving, more understanding, more insightful you become. — Rajneesh

The exercise of an extraordinary gift is the supremest pleasure in life. — Mark Twain

You can lock a lion up in a room, if you want to, but you'll still hear it growling and clawing to get out. — K. Martin Beckner

You should be proud of the pleasure you give to others' eyes. — BadSquirrel

We derive insightful perception by observing and studying, comparing and contrasting. Without investigating why we prefer the veil of life to the cloak of death and without considering how to create dangerously, live honorably, and die gloriously without remorse and regret, we risk dissipating what precious little shelf life our brittle humanity grants us. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Later in life, I learnt that many things one may require have to be weighed against one's dignity, which can be an insuperable barrier against advancement in almost any direction. However, in those days, choice between dignity and unsatisfied curiosity was less clear to me as a cruel decision that had to be made. — Anthony Powell

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

Until I moved to Stockhold I had felt there was a continuity to my life, as if it stretched unbroken from childhood up to the present, held together by new connections, in a complex and ingenious pattern in which every phenomenon I saw was capable of evoking a memory which unleashed small landslides of feeling in me, some with a known source, others without. The people I encountered came from towns I had been to, they knew other people I had met, it was a network, and it was a tight mesh. But when I moved to Stockholm this flaring up of memories became rarer and rarer, and one day it ceased altogether. That is, I could still remember; what happened was that the memories no longer stirred anything in me. No longing, no wish to return, nothing. Just the memory, and a barely perceptible hint of an aversion to anything that was connected with it. — Karl Ove Knausgard

And how rare is it to find someone who shares your tastes? The one real fight they'd ever had was over David Foster Wallace. It was around the time of Wallace's suicide. A.J. had found the reverent tone of the eulogies to be insufferable. The man had written a decent (if indulgent and overlong) novel, a few modestly insightful essays, and not much else. "Infinite Jest is a masterpiece," Harvey had said. "Infinite Jest is an endurance contest. You manage to get through it and you have no choice but to say you like it. Otherwise, you have to deal with the fact that you just wasted weeks of your life," A.J. had countered. "Style, no substance, my friend." Harvey's face had reddened as he leaned over the desk. "You say that about any writer who was born in the same decade as you! — Gabrielle Zevin

I guess it's funny how life turns out?" she tried. "Not last I checked," Errol said with a snort. — Daniel Handler

She's my best friend," I reminded him.
"If she is, she'll come to see what's good for you and she'll sort her shit out. If she's a different kind of woman, she won't. Instead, she'll see green and won't clue in that men do not want high maintenance drama queens so much they steer well clear and until she shifts that shit outta her life, it's gonna be a lonely one. Unlike her friend who sees a man drinking outta her milk jug, processes that it's highly unlikely she's gonna break him of that habit seein' as he's forty-five and still does it and has since he was a kid, lets it go and moves on all in the expanse of about a second instead of throwing a shit fit about it which gets her nowhere, is a waste of energy and leaves both involved feeling like garbage."
Well, I had to admit, all that was interesting and insightful and weirdly mature. — Kristen Ashley

And now a hundred subjective years had passed in those hundred objective hours and he could no longer clearly visualize the university at all or the life of sad frustration he had been leading there toward the end. — Isaac Asimov

Entrepreneurship is about turning what excites you in life into capital, so that you can do more of it and move forward with it. — Richard Branson

You are where you are in life because of what you believe is possible for yourself. — Oprah Winfrey

The first and the last steps on the ladder of life are the most insightful. — Kristian Goldmund Aumann

Living a good life is like flipping pancakes. If you hesitate, it splatters all over the place. — Matt Simpson

Content is anything that adds value to the reader's life. — Avinash Kaushik

The Dream Lover-what a bold, insightful, and enticing novel. And how vigorously Elizabeth Berg brings us the iconoclastic life of George Sand. Berg writes with such intimacy and compassion that I think she must have some shared ancestral DNA with Sand. I savored every page. — Frances Mayes

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

Most of our healing occurs during quiet moments of rest when we are in contact with unconscious feelings and experiences. I can't imagine life without the peaceful, insightful moments I have during meditation. — Janet Gallagher Nestor

You don't always get to know what happened, or why things happened a certain way, but it always, always, goes deeper than any one thing. — Abby Fabiaschi

Spirituality can be severed from both vicious sectarianism and thoughtless banalities. Spirituality, I have come to see, is nothing less than the thoughtful love of life. [Spirituality for the Skeptic] — Robert C. Solomon

The game of life is the game of everlasting learning. At least it is if you want to win. — Charlie Munger

Life is a long lesson in humility. — J.M. Barrie

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

It paid barely a living wage, but he stayed with it - gradually and in the end gratefully arriving at the point in life when you understand there are no great changes ahead. — Ann Packer

Religion is not something separate and apart from ordinary life. It is life - life of every kind viewed from the standpoint of meaning and purpose: life lived in the fuller awareness of its human quality and spiritual significance. — A. Powell Davies

Intuitive knowing can be described as an openness to flashes of insight — Laurie Nadel

The Blessing #1:

May your eyes be profitable,
may your ears be dutiful,
may your tongue be insightful,
may your hands be successful.

May your mind be fruitful,
may your heart be blissful,
may your soul be joyful,
may your life be peaceful. — Matshona Dhliwayo

So although there is no phoenix here, there is, nonetheless, a fierce, stubborn, wildly insightful, arrogantly honest, crazily committed, and caring human, who will take the heat, the brunt of whatever silver spoon joke you may have, so I can help you have everything you want in your life. And I mean everything. — Lauren Handel Zander

Certainly, I am inspired by those whose journeys enriches mine. I am indebted to those whose inspirations are gained through insightful reflections about life, living and legacy. — Doc Wends Cagape

Yes, that's right ... love should come before logic ... Only then will man come to understand the meaning of life. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

What better way to learn about life in the ocean
and how we are changing it
than through stories of blind zombie worms, immortal jellyfish, and unicorns of the sea? The Extreme Life of the Sea is an insightful book that inspires awe and wonder about our ocean, and brilliantly shows us the immense possibilities of life on Earth. — Enric Sala

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

Crazy by definition is
Knowing that true sanity is
A figment of the educated mind — Caleb Warta

Never ever stop dreaming. You will make it big one day. What is life without our struggles? Our struggles give us insight and depth into life. — Avijeet Das

He realized that he agonized over everything all the time, and he admitted that part of the problem in the Carter game had been his own lack of belief in his abilities. He knew the reason why he was like this, that it was the price he paid for carefully watching out for himself ever since he had been a little boy. 'I've never taken a chance in life,' he said. 'I need to run in front of traffic bucknacked and get arrested. — H. G. Bissinger

What are the years from twenty to forty? Fettered and bound by personal and emotional relationships. That's bound to be. That's living. But later there's a new stage. You can think, observe life, discover something about other people and the truth about yourself. Life becomes real
significant. You see it as a whole. Not just one scene
the scene you, as an actor, are playing. No man or woman is actually himself (or herself) till after forty-five. That's when individuality has a chance. — Agatha Christie

Life made you get your hands dirty; life was vengeful if you tried an easy route. — Meghan Ciana Doidge

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

Then the molecules bestowed upon the seeker "the curse of progress". Progress was something by which man could make his society progressively more iniquitous and unjust and thereby feel more miserable. The other life forms never deviated from what Mother Nature had endowed them with. The seeker had to run faster than his designed speed to achieve progress while the lower creations, who never desired any progress, maintained their designed speed. Going faster than the design is surely going to have a deleterious effect on the engine and the chassis. You cannot send a bullock cart to space and expect it to retrieve a lost satellite. And that was what that exactly happened. — Biju Vasudevan

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

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

You have to make mistakes to find out who you aren't. You take the action, and the insight follows: You don't think your way into becoming yourself. — Anne Lamott

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

The movie Koyaanisqatsi shows non-commented time-lapse footage and focuses our attention on the very rhythm of our civilized modern life and nature. A marijuana high can do something for a user similar to what this time-lapse footage does. The enhancement of episodic memory and the acceleration of associative streams of memories can alter and enhance our recognition of patterns in our lives in various ways. If we are presented with quick associative chains of past experiences, we can see a pattern in a body of information that is usually not at once presented to our "inner eye" as such. — Sebastian Marincolo

Passion is passion. It's the excitement between the tedious spaces, and it doesn't matter where it's directed ... It can be coins or sports or politics or horses or music or faith ... the saddest people I've ever met in life are the ones who don't care deeply about anything at all. — Nicholas Sparks

Your pain made you strong. It made you
passionate and alive. It made us both who we are. -Cade — Cora Carmack

I just looked at the pattern of my life, decided I didn't like it, and changed. — David Sedaris

Sometimes I think as adults we think of them as - because they're small in size that they're small in all ways - and they're not. They have big feelings, and they have big eyes, they see things, they hear things, they're living life just the way an adult does and I think sometimes as adults we forget that. — Kevin Henkes

I braced myself for something wise and useful. Dink, like most Bubbas, could be quite insightful and kind when you least expected it.
"Always remember one thing in this life," he said, pausing to stare at the koala's big brown glass eyes. I knew he woulda shot it if we were really in the wild.
"What is it, Dink? What should I remember? I could really use some perspective here."
"Always remember ... you can't drink all day if you don't start in the mornin'. — Celia Rivenbark

Char Miller's lively, insightful account of the life and world of American forester Gifford Pinchot fills a vitally important gap in environmental and conservation history. Anyone captivated by the issues and controversies surrounding the preservation and development of the nation's natural heritage should read this engaging, carefully researched biography. — Carolyn Merchant

There's a fine line between career criminals and career professionals because most of us fall somewhere in between. — Samantha Leahy

Life is not about how long you live or how much you experience. Life is about how you choose to live it and what you experience. — Marlene Hansen

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

In as much time as it takes to smoke a cigarette, a person's life was changed forever. — Karen McQuestion

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

Life does not require us to be consistent, cruel, patient, helpful, angry, rational, thoughtless, loving, rash, open-minded, neurotic, careful, rigid, tolerant, wasteful, rich, downtrodden, gentle, sick, considerate, funny, stupid, healthy, greedy, beautiful, lazy, responsive, foolish, sharing, pressured, intimate, hedonistic, industrious, manipulative, insightful, capricious, wise, selfish, kind or sacrificed. Life does, however, require us to live with the consequences of our choices. — Richard Bach

Nin knew how much humans loved money, riches, and material things - though he never really could understand why. The more technologically advanced the human species got, the more isolated they seemed to become, at the same time. It was alarming, how humans could spend entire lifetimes engaged in all kinds of activities, without getting any closer to knowing who they really were, inside. — Jess C. Scott

There is something cathartic about what has happened to me during this stay in hospital. I've heard others say that coming face to face with your own mortality can have this effect. You look with harsh, savage eyes at the life you are living and resolve to make the best of the time you have left, if you can be allowed the luxury of a few extra years to fulfill your plans. Around me, I see an urgency creep into the lives of friends once they have an AIDS diagnosis: they rush out and try to complete as many life projects as they can, before their health deteriorates. — David Menadue

As an improviser, I always find it jarring when I meet someone in real life whose first answer is no. "No, we can't do that." "No, that's not in the budget." "No, I will not hold your hand for a dollar." What kind of way is that to live? — Tina Fey