Quotes About Understanding

thought can never ripen into truth.

It is better to hear than to speak.

Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history.

we are what we know.

The cramping influence of a hard formalist on a young child in repressing his spirits and courage, paralyzing the understanding, and that without producing indignation, but only fear and obedience, and even much sympathy with his tyranny, - is a familiar fact explained to the child when he becomes a man, only by seeing that the oppressor of his youth is himself a child tyrannized over by those names and words and forma, of whose influence he was merely the organ to the youth.

The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.

Why should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood? All men have my blood, and I have all men's.

Is it not the true scholar the only true master?

Love is as much its demand as perception. Indeed, neither can be perfect without the other.

We know more from nature than we can at will communicate. Its light flows into the mind evermore, and we forget its presence.

The action of the soul is oftener in that which is felt and left unsaid than in that which is said in any conversation. It broods over every society, and they unconsciously seek for it in each other. We know better than we do. We do not yet possess ourselves, and we know at the same time that we are much more. I feel the same truth how often in my trivial conversation with my neighbors, that somewhat higher in each of us overlooks this by-play, and Jove nods to Jove from behind each of us.

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst.

There is no teaching until the pupil is brought into the same state or principle in which you are; a transfusion takes place; he is you and you are he; then is a teaching, and by no unfriendly chance or bad company can he ever quite lose the benefit.

For the secrets of life are not shown except to sympathy and likeness.

Sorrow makes us all children again[,] destroys all differences of intellect[.] The wisest know nothing[.]

so much of nature as he is ignorant of,so much of his own mind does not yet posess

Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine, — a possession for all time.

In every man there is something wherein I may learn of him, and in that I am his pupil

What is the soul? Commonly, it's defined as an immortal spirit placed inside each person's body by God. But Emerson had a very different understanding. For Emerson, the soul encompasses both mind and heart. It's the ruler of the mind and emotions. The soul

Treat men as pawns and ninepins and you shall suffer as well as they. If you leave out their heart, you shall lose your own.

Wise men read very sharply all your private history in your look and gait and behavior. The whole economy of nature is bent on expression. The telltale body is all tongues.

I am hindered of meeting God in my brother, because he has shut his own temple doors, and recites fables merely of his brother's, or his brother's brother's God.

Yes, but does Maine have anything to SAY to Florida?

Treat all people as if they are real, because who knows, perhaps they are.