Quotes Tagged "insight"

Friends are the family you choose (~ Nin/Ithilnin, Elven rogue).

How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be as ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.

You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.

A stumble may prevent a fall.

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.

Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.

Because it's much more pleasant to be obsessed over how the hero gets out of his predicament than it is over how I get out of mine.

He had a look of composed dissatisfaction, as if he understood life thoroughly.

Religions are like a ladder. If you cling to them, you cannot progress further. Religious organizations have their hidden agenda. They heavily rely on the past. They want to drag you towards the past. But you have to stand on your own. You have to work for your own liberation. Liberation is a state of mind and that is achievable right in this moment. It all depends on your choice. The moment you take the decision, you are free from the past; you are free from the thoughts.

It is debatable whether blind faith is truly faith at all. Faith is the perceptive gray area where scientific facts meet an individual's experiential truths - the extreme of the former is left feeling in the dark whereas the latter is caught blinded by the light. By proper scientific method, it is intellectually dishonest for me to declare the existence of God with utmost certainty, but to my individual spirit, I would be intellectually dishonest to deny the existence of God even for a second. This leaves the best of both worlds, as the believer is called to be able to give reasons for his faith, a deviation from mere fantasy.

Could it be that it’s not a belief in God that’s absurd, but rather it’s our perpetually limited understanding of God that’s really the thing that’s absurd.

Anya looked upon Nin admirably. Having him as a partner-in-crime—if only on this one occasion, which she hoped would only be the start of something more—was more revitalizing than the cheap thrills of a cookie-cutter shallow, superficial romance, where the top priority was how beautiful a person was on the outside.

Your strength will be found when you stop struggling with yourself, instead of thinking everyone is a struggle worth overcoming. Every obstacle in life is a lesson that teaches us, not others.

Each of us is shaped by the truth of our natures. Von to Silver

You can always tell the heart of man by what he do, and by what he don't do...

CHORONZON: I am a dire wolf, prey-stalking, lethal prowler. MORPHEUS: I am a hunter, horse-mounted, wolf-stabbing. CHORONZON: I am a horsefly, horse-stinging, hunter-throwing. MORPHEUS: I am a spider, fly-consuming, eight legged. CHORONZON: I am a snake, spider-devouring, posion-toothed. MORPHEUS: I am an ox, snake-crushing, heavy-footed. CHORONZON: I am an anthrax, butcher bacterium, warm-life destroying. MORPHEUS: I am a world, space-floating, life-nurturing. CHORONZON: I am a nova, all-exploding... planet-cremating. MORPHEUS: I am the Universe -- all things encompassing, all life embracing. CHORONZON: I am Anti-Life, the Beast of Judgment. I am the dark at the end of everything. The end of universes, gods, worlds... of everything. Sss. And what will you be then, Dreamlord? MORPHEUS: I am hope.

I would rather be able to appreciate things I cannot have than to have things I am not able to appreciate.

A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.

The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds

Any man filled with empathy is capable of gaining valuable insights on the human condition through the suffering of others. You do not need to suffer to know suffering, but you need empathy first to identify and feel the suffering of others around you.