Quotes About Understanding

What is a sheep only millions of little bits of sheepness whirling around and doing intricate convolutions inside the sheep? What else is it but that?

You may have come on no bicycle, he said, but that does not say that you know everything.

Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.

Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.

Children know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing.

Satisfy your demand for reason but always remember that charity is beyond reason, and God can be known through charity.

What people don't realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.

When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.

The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.

I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don't know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it again.

I once received a letter from an old lady in California who informed me that when the tired reader comes home at night, he wishes to read something that will lift up his heart. And it seems her heart had not been lifted up by anything of mine she had read. I think that if her heart had been in the right place, it would have been lifted up.

He had a look of composed dissatisfaction, as if he understood life thoroughly.

You know, Daddy said, it's some that can live their whole life out without asking about it and it's others has to know why it is, and this boy is one of the latters. He's going to be into everything!

To know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks.

W]hat one has as a born Catholic is something given and accepted before it is experienced. I am only slowly coming to experience things that I have all along accepted. I suppose the fullest writing comes from what has been accepted and experienced both and that I have just not got that far yet all the time. Conviction without experience makes for harshness.

sitting with him was like sitting by yourself; he didn't talk except when it suited him. You asked him a question in the morning and he might answer in the afternoon, or he might never.

Most things are beyond me, Block said. I ain't found anything yet that I thoroughly understood

I write to discover what I know

Some of us have taken off our blindfolds and see that there's nothing to see. It's a kind of salvation.

Mr. Head stood very still and felt the action of mercy touch him again but this time he knew that there were no words in the world that could name it. He understood that it grew out of agony, which is not denied to any man and which is given in strange ways to children.

A faith that just accepts is a child's faith and all right for children, but eventually you have to grow religiously as every other way, though some never do. What people don't realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. ... remember that these things are mysteries and that if they were such that we could understand them, they wouldn't be worth understanding. A God you understood would be less than yourself.

I like his eyes, she observed, They don't look like they see what he's looking at but they keep on looking.

What people don't realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.

Remember what you won't get if you don't mind, her grandfather remarked.