Possible Insight Quotes & Sayings

There is a world beyond this black world. There is a world of the possible. A world where Anne can be queen is a world where Cromwell can be Cromwell. He sees it; then he doesn't. The moment is fleeting. But insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before. — Hilary Mantel

Make sure to immediately write down any impressions you receive. Intuitive impressions are often subtle and therefore 'evaporate' very quickly, so make sure to capture them in writing as soon as possible. Recent research in neuroscience indicates that an intuitive insight - or any new idea - not captured within 37 seconds is likely never to be recalled again. In 7 minutes, it's gone forever. As my buddy Mark Victor Hansen likes to say, 'As soon as you think it, ink it!' — Jack Canfield

The insight to see possible new paths, the courage to try them, the judgment to measure results - these are the qualities of a leader. — Mary Parker Follett

Above all, be at ease, be as natural and spacious as possible. Slip quietly out of the noose of your habitual anxious self, release all grasping, and relax into your true nature. Think of your ordinary emotional, thought-ridden self as a block of ice or a slab of butter left out in the sun. If you are feeling hard and cold, let this aggression melt away in the sunlight of your meditation. Let peace work on you and enable you to gather your scattered mind into the mindfulness of Calm Abiding, and awaken in you the awareness and insight of Clear Seeing. And you will find all your negativity disarmed, your aggression dissolved, and your confusion evaporating slowly like mist into the vast and stainless sky of your absolute nature. — Sogyal Rinpoche

If through practice of insight you develop a sense of ease, then time has no relevance. If you're miserable, time does matter. It's so unbearable, so enormous you want to get out of it as soon as possible. — Dalai Lama

Perhaps the most important insight of all with regard to success is that to achieve greatly, you must become a different person. It is not the material things you accomplish or acquire that matter so much as it is the quality of the person you must become to accomplish well above the average. The development of self-discipline is the high road that makes everything possible for you. — Brian Tracy

The miracle is not to walk on water or in thin air, but to walk on Earth. Walk in such a way that you become fully alive and joy and happiness are possible. That is the miracle that everyone can perform ... If you have mindfulness, concentration, and insight then every step you make on this Earth is performing a miracle. — Thich Nhat Hanh

Density, complexity, and historical-semantic value that is so strong as to make politics possible ... Gramsci's insight is to have recognised that subordination, fracturing, diffusion, reproducing, as much as producing, creating, forcing, guiding, are necessary aspects of elaboration. — Edward Said

Lateral thinking ... is the process of using information to bring about creativity and insight restructuring. Lateral thinking can be learned, practised and used. It is possible to acquire skill in it just as it is possible to acquire skill in mathematics. — Edward De Bono

Indeed, these errors and my prompt confessions have made me surer, if possible, of my insight into the implications of truth and ahimsa. — Mahatma Gandhi

The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build-the thing customers want and will pay for-as quickly as possible. In other words, the Lean Startup is a new way of looking at the development of innovative new products that emphasizes fast iteration and customer insight, a huge vision, and great ambition, all at the same time. — Eric Ries

One may always attempt as much insight, love, freedom of thought and expression, justice and tolerance as possible for oneself and the very few people who share one's truest life. To be a 'free lord' in secret is better than being a public slave, a willing accomplice of repression and injustice. — Hakim Bey

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

We cannot get by Auschwitz. We should not even try, as great as the temptation is, because Auschwitz belongs to us, is branded into our history, and - to our benefit! - has made possible an insight that could be summarized as, 'Now we finally know ourselves.' — Gunter Grass

In Galapagos, as elsewhere, things of the mind, including intellectual ramifications from evolutionary theory, and things of the spirit, like the feeling one gets from a Queen Anne's lace of stars in the moonless Galapagean sky, struggle toward accommodation with an elementary desire for material comfort ... because so many regard this archipelago as preeminently a terrain of the mind and spirit, a locus of biological thought and psychological rejuvenation. The sheer strength of Darwin's insight into the development of biological life gently urges a visitor to be more than usually observant here- to notice, say, that while the thirteen Galapagean finches are all roughly the same hue, it is possible to separate them according to marked differences in the shapes of their bills and feeding habits. — Barry Lopez

The will of God, the creator and ruler of the universe, embraces all possible wills, His own as well as that of every man born into this world. If this is so, intervened Jesus with sudden insight, then each man is a part of God. — Jose Saramago

I'd known since girlhood that I wanted to be a book editor. By high school, I'd pore over the acknowledgments section of novels I loved, daydreaming that someday a brilliant talent might see me as the person who 'made her book possible' or 'enhanced every page with editorial wisdom and insight.' Could I be the Maxwell Perkins to some future Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wolfe? — Bridie Clark

Just like changing personality, culture change is possible but difficult. — Pearl Zhu

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

Might it be possible at some future time, when neurophysiology has advanced substantially, to reconstruct the memories or insight of someone long dead? ... It would be the ultimate breach of privacy. — Carl Sagan

Mystics love to make things as obscure as possible, I've learned, and never use a sentence when a paragraph of riddles will do. Priests, savants, politicians, and barristers are much the same.

The ambitious believe that if you want people to think you're smart, pose as pretentiously as possible and charge a premium for confusion and wasted time. — William Dietrich

Voltaire remarked that it is possible to kill a flock of sheep by witchcraft if you give them plenty of arsenic at the same time. The sheep, in this figure, may well stand for the complacent apologists of capitalism; Marx's penetrating insight and bitter hatred of oppression supply the arsenic, while the labour theory of value provides the incantations. — Joan Robinson

The things that were needed to keep the imagination free were "all written down in this age of reason." It was time to take the opportunity to use this imagination. All bets were off, "Fire at will." Standing next to the message in Pulling Punches, where there was only the faintest hint of solace, the message in The Ink in the Well seemed to be that in Picasso, Cocteau, and Sartre, a home of sorts had been found that went some way to - if not answering the questions - opening the mind to give the insight possible to find the answers. The references to Sartre and Cocteau were oblique and hidden in the phrase "The blood of a poet, the ink in the well, it's all written down in this age of reason. — Christopher E. Young

Some of my most precious moments of insight have been those in which I have seen clearly that gratitude is the only possible response." (Sylvia Boorstein, from "You Don't Look Buddhist") — Sylvia Boorstein

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.

Feelings, too, are facts. Emotion is a fact. Human experience is a fact. It is often possible to gain more real insight into human beings and their motivation by reading great fiction than by personal acquaintance. — Eleanor Roosevelt

Expertise gives you enough insight to reinvent what everyone else assumes is the truth. Sure, it's possible to randomly challenge the conventions of your field and luckily find a breakthrough. It's far more likely, though, that you will design a great Web site or direct a powerful movie or lead a breakthrough product development if you understand the status quo better than anyone else. Beginner's luck is dramatically overrated. Emotional — Seth Godin

I personally claim no special insight into Satan's methods, but I have at times been able to identify his influence and his actions in my life and in the lives of others. When I was on my first mission, Satan sought to divert me from my future path and, if possible, to destroy my usefulness in the Lord's work. — James E. Faust

Consolidate What's Been Learned While it is true that you learn the most in the midst of a project, the lessons are not generally coherent. Any individual can have a great insight but may not have the time to pass it on. A process might be flawed, but you don't have time to fix it under the current schedule. Sitting down afterward is a way of consolidating all that you've learned - before you forget it. Postmortems are a rare opportunity to do analysis that simply wasn't possible in the heat of the project. — Ed Catmull

Except in the eyes of a few fanatics (untrustworthy as all lovers) an unmitigated expanse of water is dull even when blue: not in a small boat, where you are part of the winds and currents and tides and are allowed to hold the tiller now and then; but from those decks which the shipping companies with subconscious insight try to make as suburban as possible so that the impact of the monster outside may be lessened, and where the unrecognized boredom is so deep that a wispy smear of smoke on the horizon will queue up a crowd as if for a Valkyrie passing. — Freya Stark

In asking philosophical questions, we use a reason shaped by the body, a cognitive unconscious to which we have no direct access, and metaphorical thought of which we are largely unaware. The fact that abstract thought is mostly metaphorical means that answers to philosophical questions have always been, and always will be, mostly metaphorical. In itself, that is neither good nor bad. It is simply a fact about the capacities of the human mind. But it has major consequences for every aspect of philosophy. Metaphorical thought is the principal tool that makes philosophical insight possible and that constrains the forms that philosophy can take. — George Lakoff

You carry Mother Earth within you. She is not outside of you. Mother Earth is not just your environment. In that insight of inter-being, it is possible to have real communication with the Earth, which is the highest form of prayer. — Thich Nhat Hanh

This kind of understanding - seeing the world (as we rather tritely say today) from the other fellow's point of view - is the political kind of insight par excellence. If we wanted to define, traditionally, the one outstanding virtue of the statesman, we could say that it consists in understanding the greatest possible number and variety of realities - not of subjective viewpoints, which of course also exist but which do not concern us here - as those realities open themselves up to the various opinions of citizens; and, at the same time, in being able to communicate between the citizens and their opinions so that the commonness of this world becomes apparent. — Hannah Arendt

If it were possible for us to have so deep an insight into a man's character as shown both in inner and in outer actions, that every, even the least, incentive to these actions and all external occasions which affect them were so known to us that his future conduct could be predicted with as great a certainty as the occurrence of a solar or lunar eclipse, we could nevertheless still assert that the man is free. — Immanuel Kant

The difference between the "natural" individuation process, which runs its course unconsciously, and the one which is consciously realized, is tremendous. In the first case consciousness nowhere intervenes; the end remains as dark as the beginning. In the second case so much darkness comes to light that the personality is permeated with light, and consciousness necessarily gains in scope and insight. The encounter between conscious and unconscious has to ensure that the light which shines in the darkness is not only comprehended by the darkness, but comprehends it. The filius solis et lunae (the son of the Sun and Moon) is the possible result as well as the symbol of this union of opposites. It is the alpha and omega of the process, the mediator and intermedius. "It has a thousand names," say the alchemists, meaning that the source from which the individuation process rises and the goal toward which it aims is nameless, ineffable. — C. G. Jung

Anytime new insight replaces an old assumption or a fossilized perception is the spring. New understandings sprout, new tolerances appear, and new curiosity draws you to previously dark places. Just as the sun shines earlier and longer in the spring, changes that seemed impossible appear to be possible with each new insight into your own health. — Gary Zukav

Invisible prose only!" rules out the sparkling style of [writers] ... For [whom] vivid prose, and the visionary mind it evinces, rich with speculation, insight, and subjectivity, is the craft and offers a unique caliber of truth. Is there any other art form one would praise by saying it's "invisible"? By definition, art transcends the ordinary, calls attention to itself, and offers virtuosity as its calling card. One that makes it possible to do what metaphor does so well: illuminate what can't be wholly understood. — Diane Ackerman