Quotes About Understanding

Father, what you said to me was absolutely true but totally useless.' 

We see people and things not as they are, but as we are. That is why when two people look at something or someone, you get two different reactions. We see things and people not as they are, but as we are.

Lo que necesitas no es renunciar, sino comprender, tomar conciencia. Si tus apegos te han ocasionado sufrimiento y aflicción, ésa es una buena ayuda para comprender. Si

Isn't it wonderful to realize you're no better than anybody else in this world?

The lovely thing about Jesus was that he was so at home with sinners, because he understood that he wasn't one bit better than they were.

Drop your false ideas. See through people. If you see through yourself, you will see through everyone. Then you will love them. Otherwise you spend the whole time grappling with your wrong notions of them, with your illusions that are constantly crashing against reality.

No one can sin in the light of awareness. Sin occurs, not, as we mistakenly think, in malice, but in ignorance. "Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing." To see this is to acquire the indiscriminate quality one so admires in the rose, the lamp and the tree.

Comprende tu oscuridad, y ésta se desvanecerá; entonces sabrás lo que es la luz. Comprende tu pesadilla como tal pesadilla, y ésta cesará; entonces despertarás a la realidad. Comprende tus falsas creencias, y éstas perderán fuerza; entonces conocerás el sabor de la felicidad.

He sees what other people don't." What the war did to dreamers.

All my life, he thinks, my best companions cannot speak the same language as me.

I am hearing you. On radio. Is why I come.

Boil the words you already know down to their bones,' Rex [Browning] says, 'and usually you find the ancients sitting there at the bottom of the pot, staring back up.

The urge to know scrapes against the inability to know.

Each sign signifies a sound, and to link sounds is to form words, and to link words is to construct worlds.

How? How did Jutta understand so much more about how the world worked? While he knew so little?

Ignorance was, in the end, and in so many ways, a privilege: to find a shell, to feel it, to understand only on some unspeakable level why it bothered to be so lovely. What joy he found in that, what utter mystery.

Von Rumpel laughs. He appreciates that they are trying to play the game. But don't they understand that the winner has already been determined? He

Jutta, he thinks, I finally listened.

It has taken him his whole life to accept himself, and he is surprised to understand that now that he can, he does not long for one more year, one more month: eighty-six years has been enough.

He takes her hand to help her over the piles. No shells fall and no rifles crack and the light is soft and shot through with ash. Jutta, he thinks, I finally listened.

To know her is to realize the thousand forms of inquiry.

Marie-Laure is glad to hear a smile enter his voice. But beneath it she can sense his thoughts fluttering like trapped birds.

After a while, he is learning, even total darkness is not quite darkness.

Read a certain way, the Natural History is preposterous, full of erroneous assumptions and cast-off mythology. Read another way, it is a window into Roman understanding two millennia ago. Read another way, it is a tribute to wonder itself