Quotes About Understanding

If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.

The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn't misled you into thinking you know something you actually don't know.

When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.

And what is good, Phaedrus, And what is not good— Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

You don't have to choose between being scientific and being compassionate.

Stephanie knew mat in many things

Though they have not the capacity to reply, I refuse to believe that our pets have no comprehension

What do you teach?" "Art history." From Taylor's expression, this made little sense.

He and his young colleague, the Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel, had an understanding: they knew that either one of them might be so deeply absorbed in thought that any disturbance could prove fatal to whatever work was being done, and if there was no immediate response to an interruption—such as a knock—then it was best to retire quietly until another time.

I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.

In storytelling, logic is retroactive.

We often see films with a cast of excellent characters...except one, who's dreadful. We wonder why until we realize that the writer hates this character. He's trivializing and insulting this role at every opportunity. And I'll never understand this. How can a writer hate his own character? It's his baby. How can he hate what he gave life? Embrace all your creations, especially the bad people. They deserve love like everyone else.

We go to the movies to enter a new, fascinating world, to inhabit vicariously another human being who at first seems so unlike us and yet at heart is like us

Fact, no matter how minutely observed, is truth with a small "t." Big "T" Truth is located behind, beyond, inside, below the surface of things, holding reality together or tearing it apart, and cannot be directly observed.

The storyteller leads us into expectation, makes us think we understand, then cracks open reality

Stories are the currency of human relationships.

Now that I am older and hopefully wiser, I more fully appreciate

She realized that her anger at doing the numbers—the income statement and balance sheet—came from her embarrassment about not understanding them.

Money is an idea that is more clearly seen with your mind.

I could see the light was going on in his head.

The golden rule of relationships is "Cause no indignity." A loving relationship is one in which both partners take care to protect each other's dignity. A wounded soul heals more slowly than a wounded body, so it is as important to avoid indignity as it is to avoid outright harm.

First you guess. Don't laugh, this is the most important step. Then you compute the consequences. Compare the consequences to experience. If it disagrees with experience, the guess is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn't matter how beautiful your guess is or how smart you are or what your name is. If it disagrees with experience, it's wrong. That's all there is to it. – Richard Feynman

On the whole I consider the constant need for delight and diversion in completely new things to be a sign of pettiness, lack of inner life, of estrangement from nature, and of a mediocre or defective gift of understanding.

What we understand and love understands and loves us also.