Insight Quotes - Page 15

• In order to gain some insight into the forces that elevate certain products to the level of 'works of art' it is helpful - among other investigations - to look into the economic and political underpinnings of the institutions, individuals and groups who share in the control of power.

  Hans Haacke

  Art, Order, Political

  Hans Haacke, Museum of Modern Art (Oxford, England), Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum (1978). “Hans Haacke: Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1978; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 1979”

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• The trick now is to turn insight into foresight. The trick is to know this about your tomorrow, today... Remember, your future is not coming to you; it's coming through you...change your idea about the changes to come, even as you change your idea about the changes that have passed. Then you can change your experience of both.

  Neale Donald Walsch

  Ideas, Today, Tomorrow

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• When scientists need to explain difficult points of theory, illustration by hypothetical example - rather than by total abstraction - works well (perhaps indispensably) as a rhetorical device. Such cases do not function as speculations in the pejorative sense - as silly stories that provide insight into complex mechanisms - but rather as idealized illustrations to exemplify a difficult point of theory. (Other fields, like philosophy and the law, use such conjectural cases as a standard device.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Philosophy, Silly, Law

  Stephen Jay Gould (2011). “Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms”, p.310, Harvard University Press

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• 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

  Creativity, Thinking, Skills

  Edward De Bono (2010). “Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step”, p.3, Harper Collins

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• In some mysterious way, once one has gained an insight into human nature, that insight grows from day to day, and he to whom it has given to experience vicariously even one single form of earthly suffering acquires, by reason of this tragic lesson, an understanding of all its forms, even those most foreign to him, and apparently abnormal.

  Stefan Zweig

  Understanding, Suffering, Abnormal

  "Beware of Pity". Book by Stefan Zweig, 1939.

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• Initiating and going through a divorce with four kids can be a brutal experience, but also a tempering one. It gave me perspective and insight to be able to find the love of my life.

  Tony Robbins

  Kids, Divorce, Love Of My Life

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• Breakthroughs happen when the insight comes that I can do something right now to improve things. I am constantly looking to do something to provide people with strategies to create those immediate breakthroughs. That's my mission.

  Tony Robbins

  People, Strategy, Missions

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• Be clear in your mind why learning to draw well is important. Drawing enables you to see in that special, epiphanous way that artists see, no matter what style you use to express your special insight. Your goal in drawing should be to encounter the reality of experience... to see ever more clearly, ever more deeply.

  Betty Edwards

  Artist, Reality, Drawing

  Betty Edwards (1999). “The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain”, Tarcher

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• The colossal misunderstanding of our time is the assumption that insight will work with people who are unmotivated to change.

  Edwin H Friedman

  People, Understanding, Unmotivated

  Edwin H. Friedman (2007). “A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix”, p.9, Church Publishing, Inc.

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• It is a rare and valuable tonic to share insights, dreams and concerns with people whom you have never met. The sole purpose for such exchanges is simply to give light to one another.

  Allison Mackie

  Dream, Communication, Light

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• Combining valuable insights from his experience in China, his time as the World Bank's chief economist, and the 2008 financial crisis, Justin Yifu Lin's recommendations for development policy reflect an impressive and unique personal journey.

  Kemal Dervis

  Journey, Unique, Development

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• If we could travel into the past, it's mind-boggling what would be possible. For one thing, history would become an experimental science, which it certainly isn't today. The possible insights into our own past and nature and origins would be dazzling. For another, we would be facing the deep paradoxes of interfering with the scheme of causality that has led to our own time and ourselves. I have no idea whether it's possible, but it's certainly worth exploring.

  Carl Sagan

  Past, Ideas, Mind

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• To view an object in the proper light we must stand away from it. The study of the classical literatures gives the aloofness which cultivates insight. In learning to live with peoples and civilizations that have long ceased to be alive, we gain a vantage point, acquire an enlargement and elevation of thought, which enable us to study with a more impartial and liberal mind the condition of the society around us.

  John Lancaster Spalding

  Light, Views, Civilization

  John Lancaster Spalding (1901). “Aphorisms and Reflections: Conduct, Culture and Religion”

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• To secure approval one must remain within the bounds of conventional mediocrity. Whatever lies beyond, whether it be greater insight and virtue, or greater stolidity and vice, is condemned. The noblest men, like the worst criminals, have been done to death.

  John Lancaster Spalding

  Lying, Men, Vices

  John Lancaster Spalding (1901). “Aphorisms and Reflections: Conduct, Culture and Religion”

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• My curiosity was in no way cruel. Deviations from the commonplace attracted me strongly, as they still do; and to me the hermaphrodite and the living skeleton were interesting for the same reason as was Creatore, or the resplendent Guardsmen of the bands - because such people did not often come my way, and I hoped that they might impart some great revelation to me, some insight which would help me to a clearer understanding of the world about me.

  Robertson Davies

  Skeletons, Interesting, People

  "I Remember Creatore". Essay by Robertson Davies, 1948.

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• New insight begins when satisfaction comes to an end, when all that has been seen, said, or done looks like a distortion. ... Man's true fulfillment depends on communion with that which transcends him.

  Abraham Joshua Heschel

  Men, Looks, Done

  Abraham Joshua Heschel (1997). “Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays”, p.31, Macmillan

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• This food-and-shelter theory concerning man's efforts is without insight. Our most persistent and spectacular efforts are concerned not with the preservation of what we are but with the building up of an imaginary conception of ourselves in the opinion of others. The desire for praise is more imperative than the desire for food and shelter.

  Eric Hoffer

  Men, Building Up, Effort

  "Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook" by Tom Bethell in Harper's Magazine, July 2005.

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• Margaret Mead was both a student of civilization and an exemplar of it. To a public of millions, she brought the central insight of cultural anthropology: that varying cultural patterns express an underlying human unity. She mastered her discipline, but she also transcended it. Intrepid, independent, plain spoken, fearless, she remains a model for the young and a teacher from whom all may learn.

  Margaret Mead

  Teacher, Independent, Civilization

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• The most fertile source of insight is hindsight.

  Morris Kline

  Hindsight, Source, Fertile

  Morris Kline (1982). “Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty”, p.101, Oxford University Press, USA

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• Hoyle's enduring insights into stars, nucleosynthesis, and the large-scale universe rank among the greatest achievements of 20th-century astrophysics. Moreover, his theories were unfailingly stimulating, even when they proved transient.

  Fred Hoyle

  Stars, Achievement, Century

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• We shall not read it for its sociological insights, which are non-existent, nor as science fiction, because it has a general air of implausibility; but there is one high poetic fancy in the New Atlantis that stays in the mind after all its fancies and inventions have been forgotten. In the New Atlantis, an island kingdom lying in very distant seas, the only commodity of external trade is light: Bacon's own special light, the light of understanding.

  Peter Medawar

  Lying, Sea, Islands

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• The taboos that constitute a man's intellectual stature, often sedimented experiences and unarticulated insights, always operate against inner impulses that he has learned to condemn, but which are so strong that only an unquestioning and unquestioned authority can hold them in check.

  Theodor Adorno

  Strong, Men, Intellectual

  "Minima Moralia". Book by Theodor W. Adorno, 1951.

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• When one read's Kierkegaard's profound analyses of anxiety and despair or Nietzsche's amazingly acute insights into the dynamics of resentment and the guilt and hostility which accompany repressed emotional powers, one might pinch oneself to realize that one is reading works written in the last century and not some new contemporary psychological analysis.

  Rollo May

  Reading, Emotional, Profound

  Rollo May (2015). “The Discovery of Being”, p.53, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Nor do piecemeal steps however well intended, even partially resolve problems that have reached a universal, global and catastrophic character. If anything, partial 'solutions' serve merely as cosmetics to conceal the deep seated nature of the ecological crisis. They thereby deflect public attention and theoretical insight from an adequate understanding of the depth and scope of the necessary changes.

  Murray Bookchin

  Character, Understanding, Depth

  "The Ecology of Freedom". Book by Murray Bookchin, 1982.

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• It turns out that information leaks between universes at the quantum level. We think it accounts for all kinds of phenomena, from what drives evolution to strange insights and mystical experiences through the ages. The machine was built as an attempt to investigate and amplify them.

  James P. Hogan

  Thinking, Mystical Experiences, Age

  James P. Hogan (1997). “Paths to Otherwhere”, Pocket Books

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