Quotes About Understanding

Look deep, deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better. - Albert Einstein | Nature Quotes

Anger is the only negative emotion that people all over the world usually want to keep.

REBT, then, helps you not only to understand what you "are" but to change what you harmfully think, feel, and do. It accepts your desires, wishes, preferences, goals, and values, then tries to help you achieve them. But REBT shows you how to separate your preferences from your insistences—and thus keep from sabotaging your own goals. It gives you insight into what you are now doing rather than into what you (and your damned parents!) have done.

insight will help you very little.

Insight is another name for awareness.

Jesus was immeasurably more human than other human beings

We seem never to know what any thing means or is worth until we have lost it.

What is truth to the philosopher, would not be Truth, nor have the effect of Truth, to the peasant. The religion of the many must necessarily be more incorrect than that of the refined and reflective few, not so much in the essence as in its forms, not so much in the spiritual idea which lies latent at the bottom of it, as the symbols and dogmas in which that idea is embodied.

Unpacking books is a revelatory activity.

We read to under­stand our intu­ition of the world, to dis­cover that some­one a thou­sand miles and years away has put into words our most inti­mate desires and our most secret fears. Reading is a col­lab­o­ra­tive act.

Entering a library, I am always stuck by the way in which a certain vision of the world is imposed upon the reader through its categories and its order.

This morning I looked at the books on my shelves and thought that they have no knowledge of my existence. They come to life because I open them and turn their pages, and yet they don't know that I am their reader.

No one stepping for the first time into a room made of books can know instinctively how to behave, what is expected, what is promised, what is allowed. One may be overcome by horror--at the cluster or the vastness, the stillness, the mocking reminder of everything one doesn't know, the surveillance--and some of that overwhelming feeling may cling on, even after the rituals and conventions are learned, the geography mapped, and the natives found friendly.

Books have long been instruments of the divinatory arts.

We can live in a society founded on the book and yet not read, or we can live in a society where the book is merely an accessory and be, in the deepest, truest sense, a reader.

I have no feeling of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read; I know that my books have unlimited patience. They will wait for me till the end of my days. They don't require that I pretend to know them all, nor do they urge me to become one of the professional book-handlers ... who greedily collect books but do not read them....

There is an unbridgeable chasm between the book that traditions had declared a classic and the book (the same book) that we have made ours through instinct, emotion and understanding: suffered through it, rejoiced in it, translated it into our experience and (notwithstanding the layers of readings with which a book come into our hands) essentially become its first discoverers, an experience as astonishing and unexpected.

Every book can be, for the right reader, an oracle, responding on occasion even to questions unasked..

We read to understand, or to begin to understand

You don't immediately understand something like that, even when it's explained to you clearly. You don't understand it, because you don't know how to understand it. You lack that space in your mind that would let you take it in. You are incapable of believing in the possibility of what they are telling you, because nothing of the sort has ever happened to you before.

I enjoyed learning the poems, but I didn't understand of what use they might possibly be. 'They'll keep you company on the day you have no books to read,' my teacher said.

The books on my shelves do not know me until I open them, yet I am certain that they address me — me and every other reader — by name; they await our comments and opinions. I am presumed in Plato as I am presumed in every book, even in those I'll never read.

Je me rendis compte que personne - pas même mon père, assis à quelques pas de moi - ne pouvait pénétrer mon espace de lecture, distinguer ce que le livre m'expliquait avec impudeur, et que rien, sinon ma propre volonté, ne pouvait en donner à quiconque la possibilité.

Imensamente generosos, os meus livros, não me fazem nenhuma exigência, antes me oferecem todo tipo de iluminação.