Fleeting Insight Quotes

[A]s if life were a thunder-storm wherein you can see by a flash the horizon, and then cannot see your hand.

There was once a Hindu sage, who sat down on the banks of the Ganges and thought for seventy years about the millennium. Just as he arrived at the solution and was putting it into verse, a mosquito stung him and he forgot it again at once.

We live in an age lit by lightnin'; after the flash, we're blind again.

I have occasionally had the exquisite thrill of putting my finger on a little capsule of truth, and heard it give the faint squeak of mortality under my pressure.

Every period of time is a sphinx that throws itself into the abyss as soon as its riddle has been solved.

Painting seems like impossibility, with only a sign now and then of its own light.

What I like, or one of the things I like, about motoring is the sense it gives one of lighting accidentally, like a voyager who touches another planet with the tip of his toe, upon scenes which would have gone on, have always gone on, will go on, unrecorded, save for this chance glimpse. Then it seems to me I am allowed to see the heart of the world uncovered for a moment.

Generally speaking, it is inhumane to detain a fleeting insight.

I had a feeling once about mathematics - that I saw it all... but it was after dinner and I let it go.

All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.

The business of thinking ... undoes every morning what it had finished the night before.