Insightful Understanding Quotes

Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.

The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.

Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

History gives you insight of the same quality of truth as poetry or philosophy or a novel.

To unfold the secret laws and relations of those high faculties of thought by which all beyond the merely perceptive knowledge of the world and of ourselves is attained or matured, is a object which does not stand in need of commendation to a rational mind.

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom... in a clarification of life - not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

He whose wisdom cannot help him, gets no good from being wise.

One seeks to equip the child with deeper, more gripping, and subtler ways of knowing the world and himself.

Experience - the wisdom that enables us to recognise in an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.

I think he's informing himself, reaching out and getting ideas and information and advice. I haven't the slightest doubt that internally taking shape in that marvelous brain of his is a philosophy of foreign affairs. But it would be premature to say that one is fully formed.

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.

The one knowing what is profitable, and not the man knowing many things, is wise.

A nose that can see is worth two that sniff.

Getting rid of a delusion makes us wiser than getting hold of a truth.

True wisdom is a thing very extraordinary. Happy are they that have it: and next to them, not those many that think they have it, but those few that are sensible of their own defects and imperfections, and know that they have it not.

We are deceived if we think that mind and judgment are two different matters: judgment is but the extent of the light of the mind. This light penetrates to the bottom of matters; it remarks all that can be remarked, and perceives what appears imperceptible. Therefore we must agree that it is the extent of the light in the mind that produces all the effects which we attribute to judgment.

I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.

The chief benefit, which results from philosophy, arises in an indirect manner, and proceeds more from its secret, insensible influence, than from its immediate application.

Every therapeutic cure, and still more, any awkward attempt to show the patient the truth, tears him from the cradle of his freedom from responsibility and must therefore reckon with the most vehement resistance.

The truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects.

Obviously, stats are important tools, but I think there's something behind those things; somewhere along the way, you've got to try to look inside someone.

I have great faith in the intelligence of the American viewer and reader to put two and two together and come up with four.

The creative man with an insight into human nature, with the artistry to touch and move people, will succeed. Without them he will fail.

The way my brain works, it created me thirsty. From the off, I was a sponge for information that had emotional connotations, I think that was it. I was brought up to see the world as emotional, and anything that I could get my hands on that helped me explore that emotional stuff, I was fascinated by.