Quotes About Understanding

We all love best not those who offend us least, nor those who have done most for us, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them.

Silence is not always tact and it is tact that is golden, not silence.

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

Sir, I did not count your glasses of wine, why should you number up my cups of tea?

Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.

Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.

God Himself, sir, does not propose to judge a man until his life is over. Why should you and I?

In order that all men may be taught to speak truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it.

As I know more of mankind I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man upon easier terms than I was formerly.

Don't, Sir, accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.

He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.

Sir, I have found you an argument; but I am not obliged to find you an understanding.

A wise man will make haste to forgive, because he knows the true value of time, and will not suffer it to pass away in unnecessary pain.

The size of a man's understanding may always be justly measured by his mirth.

There is nothing so minute or inconsiderable that I would not rather know it than not know it.

Between falsehood and useless truth there is little difference. As gold which he cannot spend will make no man rich, so knowledge which cannot apply will make no man wise.

When a king asked Euclid, the mathematician, whether he could not explain his art to him in a more compendious manner? he was answered, that there was no royal way to geometry.

what reason did not dictate, reason cannot explain.

We have less reason to be surprised or offended when we find others differ from us in opinions because we very often differ from ourselves.

Reason by degrees submits to absurdity, as the eye in time is accommodated to darkness.

Who will consider that no dictionary of a living tongue ever can be perfect, since, while it is hastening to publication, some words are budding, and some falling away; that a whole life cannot be spent upon syntax and etymology, and that even a whole life would not be sufficient; that he, whose design includes whatever language can express, must often speak of what he does not understand.

The judgments which Johnson passed on books were, in his own time, regarded with superstitious veneration, and, in our time, are generally treated with indiscriminate contempt. They are the judgments of a strong but enslaved understanding. The mind of the critic was hedged round by an uninterrupted fence of prejudices and superstitions. Within his narrow limits, he displayed a vigour and an activity which ought to have enabled him to clear the barrier that confined him.

The existence of the twilight does not mean we cannot distinguish the day from the night.