Individual Insight Quotes

One man's observation is another man's closed book or flight of fancy.

We all look at the same object in different ways.

There's a million different ways you can look at a moment.

In today’s Washington, with its emphasis on orthodox thinking, such a person could never rise inside the government … This is a great loss, because, as the life of George F. Kennan shows, individual, original thinking by one lonely person can sometimes illuminate and guide us better than all the high-level panels, commissions and interagency meetings.

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.

Persons appear to us according to the light we throw upon them from our own minds. -Laura Ingalls Wilder, author (1867-1957)

Philosophizing means, then, to ascend from public dogma to essentially private knowledge.

Knowledge must be gained by ourselves. Mankind may supply us with facts; but the results, even if they agree with previous ones, must be the work of our own minds.

For me, my writing benefits from my experience.

The mercy of the West has been social revolution; the mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self/void.

Everyone sees something different in 'Endgame': a biblical apocalypse, a portrait of painful co-dependency, a confession of guilt and dignity in the face of death, a night of baffling hopelessness, a meaningless babble. Each interpretation reveals an absurd truth - not about the play, but about the person watching it.

My job is to say, 'This is how I see the world. Do you agree?'

When I follow my own head, I am, in general, much more correct in my judgment than following the opinion of others.

One must accept the fact that others don’t see what you do.

You make a movie, and if somebody reads something into it, then great, more power to him.

There are no wise few.

Some men's wit is like a dark lantern, which serves their own turn and guides them their own way, but is never known (according to the Scripture phrase) either to shine forth before men, or to glorify their Father in heaven.

Real smarts begin when you quit quoting other people.

Learned we may be with another man's learning: we can only be wise with wisdom of our own.

The road has its own reasons and no two travelers will have the same understanding of those reasons. If indeed they come to an understanding of them at all.

He who can see truly in the midst of general infatuation is like a man whose watch keeps good time, when all clocks in the town in which he lives are wrong. He alone knows the right time; what use is that to him?

The thing that seemed to me so important about the psychedelic experience was that it happened to me. I wasn't reading John Chrysostom or Meister Eckhart. And so I assumed that I am a very ordinary person, therefore, if it happened to me it could happen to anyone.

There will always be One against All, one person against all others. [This is so] not because One is terribly wise and All are terribly foolish, but because the process of thinking and researching, which finally yields truth, can only be accomplished by an individual person. In its singularity or duality, one human being seeks and finds – not the truth (Lessing) –, but some truth.

Throughout Soviet times, I understood what was really happening in the world around me.

There is no such thing as group originality, group creativity or group perspicacity.