
“Understanding requires insight. Insight must be anchored.”
Source: The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality
Source: Manual of Insight (1945), p. 70
“Understanding requires insight. Insight must be anchored.”
Source: The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality
“When you begin to see that your enemy is suffering, that is the beginning of insight.”
Source: Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life
“A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and
understanding.”
Source: The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man
On Mind and Thought (1993), p. 34
Posthumous publications
Context: It is astonishingly beautiful and interesting, how thought is absent when you have an insight. Thought cannot have an insight. It is only when the mind is not operating mechanically in the structure of thought that you have an insight. Having had an insight, thought draws a conclusion from that insight. And then thought acts and thought is mechanical. So I have to find out whether having an insight into myself, which means into the world, and not drawing a conclusion from it is possible. If I draw a conclusion, I act on an idea, on an image, on a symbol, which is the structure of thought, and so I am constantly preventing myself from having insight, from understanding things as they are.
“Politics, I now understand, is at its best when it enlightens us via an opponent's insight.”
And the Weak Suffer What They Must? : Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future (2016), Ch. 4, Trojan Horse
“Scientists work by a combination of intuition and insight in trying to understand a question.”
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan interview: 'It takes courage to tackle very hard problems in science
Essay as "Mr. X" (1969)
Context: When I'm high I can penetrate into the past, recall childhood memories, friends, relatives, playthings, streets, smells, sounds, and tastes from a vanished era. I can reconstruct the actual occurrences in childhood events only half understood at the time. Many but not all my cannabis trips have somewhere in them a symbolism significant to me which I won't attempt to describe here, a kind of mandala embossed on the high. Free-associating to this mandala, both visually and as plays on words, has produced a very rich array of insights.
There is a myth about such highs: the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we're down the next day.
“Love should be your truest religion and humanity your priority in life.”