The most intriguing people you will encounter in this life are the people who had insights about you, that you didn't know about yourself.

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.

"It's strange, isn't it, how you never know you're living the best time of your life at the moment you're living it? If you could appreciate, at that instant, that this is it, maybe you'd make certain your mind imprinted every detail of the sights, smells, sounds and sensations.

Something went klunk. Like a nickel dropping in a soda machine. One of those small insights that explains everything. This was puberty for these boys. Adolescence. The first date, the first kiss, the first chance to hold hands with someone special. Delayed, postponed, a decade's worth of longing--while everybody around you celebrates life, you pretend, suppress, inhibit, deprive yourself of you own joy--but finally ultimately, eventually, you find a place where you can have a taste of everything denied.

Getting lost, wandering to a new city and discovering a cacophony of sights, sounds, people, food is the best medicine in the world.

...much later I'd meet some Christians who used gun analogies about targets and missing the mark and all that. Or maybe it was about archery. Nevertheless, this analogy would be dragged out to tell us we were all blowing it and falling short. They also talked about how God was really mad at certain people because of what they believed or about the things they'd done. These Christians sounded a littld judgmental, to be honest. Looking back, though, these folks seemed dead-set on pulling the trigger more than anyone else I had met. They would find anybody who messed up or made a bad decision and get them in their sights.

I sit and ponder my existence: how I'm here, what put me here in these thoughts, these feelings, birthed from a timeless sleep, what it felt like, or rather the lack thereof, to not have been and now to 'be', and suddenly, I realize how absurd I am to exist, the fragility in my understanding of existence; I then wonder why the supernatural, the thought of other beings, of God or of Gods, must be distinctly absurd - by which I am no longer sure. 'If I exist and I have made myself absurd to me, then why not they exist while merely believed absurd by me?' Perhaps it is true that in a wandering head, one full of wonders, the natural becomes supernatural and the supernatural becomes preternatural (or rational within the sights of discovery and explanation), just as the return home after a life-long journey feels, for a moment, foreign after the many experiences.

The value today of philosophy to physics seems to me to be something like the value of early nation-states to their peoples. It is only a small exaggeration to say that, until the introduction of the post office, the chief service of nation-states was to protect their peoples from other nation-states. The insights of philosophers have occasionally benefited physicists, but generally in a negative fashion-by protecting them from the preconceptions of other philosophers.

"A philosophical thought is not supposed to be impervious to all criticism; this is the error Whitehead describes of turning philosophy into geometry, and it is useful primarily as a way of gaining short-term triumphs in personal arguments that no one else cares (or even knows) about anyway. A good philosophical thought will always be subject to criticisms (as Heidegger's or Whitehead's best insights all are) but they are of such elegance and depth that they change the terms of debate, and function as a sort of "obligatory passage point" (Latour's term) in the discussions that follow.

The only debatable issue, it seems to me, is whether it is more ridiculous to turn to experts in social theory for general well-confirmed propositions, or to the specialists in the great religions and philosophical systems for insights into fundamental human values.

Take courage, my heart: you have been through worse than this. Be strong, saith my heart; I am a soldier; I have seen worse sights than this.

Love is blind, they say--but isn't it more that love makes us see too much? Isn't it more that love floods our brain with sights and sounds, so that everything looks bigger, brighter, more lovely than ever before?

Excellence is a better teacher than mediocrity. The lessons of the ordinary are everywhere. Truly profound and original insights are to be found only in studying the exemplary.

No I was never one of those positive people who believes he can have whatever he sets his sights on. I just kept working at it.

All my life through the new sights of Nature made me rejoice like a child.

No matter how many goals you have achieved you must set your sights on a higher one.

And one thing I definitely enjoyed personally from a selfish point of view was exploration and going to places that I had never been to before and learning you know meeting the people and getting to know new sights and sounds etc.

One secret of leadership is that the mind of a leader never turns off. Leaders even when they are sightseers or spectators are active not passive observers.

I know of no single formula for success. But over the years I have observed that some attributes of leadership are universal and are often about finding ways of encouraging people to combine their efforts their talents their insights their enthusiasm and their inspiration to work together.

The plan we developed to deal with al Qaeda depended on developing sources of human and technical intelligence that could give us insights into his plans at the tactical level. This is easy to say but hard to accomplish.

Set your sights high the higher the better. Expect the most wonderful things to happen not in the future but right now. Realize that nothing is too good. Allow absolutely nothing to hamper you or hold you up in any way.

Our society is illuminated by the spiritual insights of the Hebrew prophets. America and Israel have a common love of human freedom and they have a common faith in a democratic way of life.

Many of the insights of the saint stem from their experience as sinners.

It is easier to learn to interpret dreams if you have a reason to use them for something constructive. You apply your dream insights to making constructive changes in your life.