Best 481 quotes in «insightful quotes» category

I am not interested in what is pleasant. I'm interested in what's useful.

i am nothing but a mosaic of the people i’ve met & the things they’ve carried.

I believe that on such an issue as this no one is or can be completely truthful. It is difficult to be certain about anything except what you have seen with your own eyes, and consciously or unconsciously everyone writes as a partisan

I care little for titles assigned to men, rather I care about the spirit of men.

I’d often wondered, absorbed in piles of research, if the magic of history would be lost if we could go back and live it. Did we varnish the past and make heroes of average men and imagine beauty and valor where there was only dirge and desperation? Or like the old man looking back on his youth, remembering only the things he’d seen, did the angle of our gaze sometimes cause us to miss the bigger picture? I didn’t think time offered clarity so much as time stripped away the emotion that colored memories. The Irish Civil War had happened eighty years before I’d traveled to Ireland. Not so far that the people had forgotten it, but enough time had passed that more—or maybe less—cynical eyes could pull the details apart and look at them for what they were.

If I were a bird,I could wish a flight unrestrained, and without bothering my sadness.

I fail to remember, the mind has fuses.

If you believe something will make the world better, then it's always worth a try, even if you fail.

If life, you get what you believe you deserve.

If the food that one ate the night before were somehow able to be seen and identified through one’s clothes throughout the day, millions of employees would each fast ten or so days before their payday.

If there is no reward, there is no reason to run

If we were not impressed by job titles, suits, and jargon, we would demand that financial advisors show us their personal bank statements before they tell us what we could or should do with our own money.

If you can imagine a solution, you can make it happen.

If you don't know when your good, how can you know when your bad?

If you don't know when you're good, how can you know when you're bad?

If you think you can't, you're wrong and right

If you want an abscess to cure you must press it hard

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

I hand over a lot of things when I'm home. Mom tells me she doesn't like my shirt I want to buy, and I hand it over. Not the shirt itself, but my wish for that shirt. I want to watch one television show and she wants to watch another one -I hand that over too. It's easier that way. I even hand over my toenails when she asks. But I think sometimes you need to put a thing in a box -even if the box is inside your head -and store it away for yourself.

I died to the inorganic state and became endowed with growth, and then I died to vegetable growth and attained to the animal. I died from the animality and became Adam; why, then, should I fear? When have I become less by dying? At the next remove, I shall die to man, that I may soar and lift my head amongst the angels. And I must escape even from the state of the angel; everything is perishing except His Face.

Information, long of reach, devastating, and as a side benefit, a substance with no serious legal repercussions, was superior to any other form of power.

I don't write to be understood; I write to understand.

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

In a world of dwindling light, you're a bonfire in the night.

In reality most human beings are not, to most human beings, more important than money.

Insight and drive are all the skills you need. Everything else can be hired.

Insight comes through relentless contemplation upon the world within and the world without.

In some cases, you can tell how somebody is being treated by their own boss from the way they are treating someone to whom they are a boss.

In space you don't stop.

Instead of being regarded as intelligent or knowledgeable, many a woman would rather be regarded as beautiful or good in the kitchen; many a man, as handsome or good in bed.

Interest makes some people blind and others quick-sighted.

In the Catskills, nostalgia runs backwards. The upwardly mobile Jewish masses of the 1950s and 1960s have been replaced by the Jews of 19th century Poland.

In the quest for power, truth is always the first thing left behind.

I reckon if you care for someone and you can't have their love, you can either be a spiteful bastard about it or you can try your damnedest to make sure they're going to find some happiness in the world.

It is romantic, yes,’ agreed Hercule Poirot. ‘It is peaceful. The sun shines. The sea is blue. But you forget, Miss Brewster, there is evil everywhere under the sun’.

In life, you get what you believe you deserve.

It goes without saying that even those of us who are going to hell will get eternal life—if that territory really exists outside religious books and the minds of believers, that is. Having said that, given the choice, instead of being grilled until hell freezes over, the average sane human being would, needless to say, rather spend forever idling in an extremely fertile garden, next to a lamb or a chicken or a parrot, which they do not secretly want to eat, and a lion or a tiger or a crocodile, which does not secretly want to eat them.

It's always easy to conquer the hungry with a piece of bread. Only the wise can conquer the strong

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.

It’s funny, isn’t it?” he said, something odd in his voice. “It’s funny how some people show they love people with dramatic proclamations and huge displays and romantic gestures…but for some people, it’s in the small things. Like the small things you do for him.

It's just me and the invader inside me and the dead - not just my family, but all the dead, all however-many-billion of them, reaching for me as I run. Reaching. Running. And it occurs to me that there's no real difference between us, the living and the dead; it's just a matter of tense: past-dead and future-dead.

It's not what we can do that makes us great, but what we can do but don't which make us great

It's only in the finer points that it gets complicated and contentious, the inability to realize that no matter what our religion or gender or race or geographic background, we all have about 98 percent in common with each other. Yes, the differences between male and female are biological, but if you look at biology as a matter of percentage, there aren't a whole lot of things that are different. Race is different purely as a social construct, not as an inherent difference. And religion - whether you believe in God or Yahweh or Allah or something else, odds are that at heart you want the same things. For whatever reason, we like to focus on the 2 percent that's different, and most of the conflict in the world comes from that.

It’s sometimes difficult to align our wants with our needs, for old programing and new paradigms vibrate at very different levels.

In dying, she allayed my greatest fear -- of death. Dying joined shoe tying and coat zipping and bed making on the long list of acts Mom demonstrated for her children, so that we could someday do it for ourselves.

I was, but then I realized that I was holding on to something that didn't exist anymore. That the person I missed didn't exist anymore. People change. The things we like and dislike change. And we can wish they couldn't all day long but that never works.

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

Listen to the sunset...see its pretty hue... When you see it, think of me...and I'll think of you...

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

Loneliness tortures many if not most of the elderly more intensely and more frequently than it torments many if not most of us who will never be or have not yet been pushed or pulled into old age.