Quotes About Understanding

In the light of the crappy little lamp, all I was looking at was a frizzy mop of blonde hair and a bare back with one big angry red patch on it, but Jesus fucking God she was beautiful, and if you don't understand that, I'm sorry for you.

Somewhere in the world there was a young woman with such splendid understanding that she'd see him entire, like a poem or story, and find his words so valuable after all that when he confessed his apprehensions she would explain why they were in fact the very things that made him precious to her ... and to Western Civilization! There was no such girl, the simple truth being.

Somewhere in the world there was a young woman with such splendid understanding that she'd see him entire, like a poem or story, and find his words so valuable after all that when he confessed his apprehensions she would explain why they were in fact the very things that made him precious to her...and to Western Civilization! There was no such girl, the simple truth being.

When you look at this mirror I hope you'll remember that there's always another way of seeing things: that's the beginning of wisdom.

No poem is easily grasped so why should any reader expect fast results?

I came on my mother shedding a few tears in the drawing room. My mother had hastily blown her nose and spoken to me in an irritated way—a rare thing for her. I knew she knew she should not have been doing it—such demonstrations either of grief or happiness were not the thing at all—and so I was not upset by her crossness, feeling that we had been caught out, as it were, together, and that we must both do better in future.

God had already made me realise that His mercy does not grow weary of waiting for some souls and that He enlightens them only slowly. So I took good care not to anticipate Him.

Whatever you think you are, that's what you are

A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements in that sentence are connected by an and and not by a but.

Why? Because true translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal

Seeing come before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.

Drawing is a form of probing. And the first generic impulse to draw derives from the human need to search, to plot points, to place things and to place oneself.

Today we see the art of the past as nobody saw it before. We actually perceive it in a different way.

We read and reread the words of the original text in order to penetrate through them, to reach, to touch the vision or experience which prompted them. We then gather up what we have found there and take this quivering almost wordless 'thing' and place it behind the language into which it needs to be translated. And now the principal task is to persuade the host language to take in and welcome the 'thing' which is waiting to be articulated.

If we can see the present clearly enough, we shall ask the right questions of the past.

Mystification has little to do with the vocabulary used. Mystification is the process of explaining away what might otherwise be evident

Yet, although every image embodies a way of seeing, our perception or appreciation of an image depends also upon our own way of seeing.

Seeing comes before words. A child looks and recognises before it can speak

To try to understand the experience of another it is necessary to dismantle the world as seen from one's own place within it, and to reassemble it as seen from his.

A]nimals are always the observed. The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance. They are the objects of our ever-extending knowledge. What we know about them is an index of our power, and thus an index of what separates us from them. The more we know, the further away they are.

The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.

To remain innocent may also be to remain ignorant.

Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.

If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.