Painful Insight Quotes

What brings enlightenment is experience, in the sad sense of this word--the pressure of hard facts and unintelligible troubles, making a man rub his eyes in his waking dream, and put two and two together. Enlightenment is cold water.

The grinding of the intellect is for most people as painful as a dentist's drill.

Rightness of judgment is bitterness to the heart.

Amer savoir, celui qu'on tire du voyage! Bitter is the knowledge gained in travelling.

Yes, I am mad - like the Marquis de Sade was mad, like Giordano Bruno was mad, like Antonin Artaud was mad.

Joy cannot unfold the deepest truths. Cometh white-robed Sorrow, stooping and wan, and flingeth wide the door she must not enter.

You know, like, real paying attention and real observation and deep thought and deep consideration can be a bit, you know, miserable-making.

Dying makes everyone weaker, subject to painful insight, and not always insight into any kind of special truth - it's just the approaching end that makes people want to believe they are seeing something in the line of a great revelation.

Everyone knows that time is Death, that Death hides in clocks. Imposing another time powered by the Clock of the Imagination, however, can refuse his law. Here, freed of the Grim Reaper's scythe, we learn that pain is knowledge and all knowledge pain.

To see was terrifying, and to stop seeing tore me apart from my forehead to my throat.