Quotes About Understanding

We don't want to merely obey God: we need to catch His heart. It is then we will glimpse the wisdom behind His directives, and not just see them as laws.

Often we judge ourselves by our intentions and everyone else by their actions. It is possible to intend one thing while communicating something totally different. Sometimes our true motives are cleverly hidden even from us.

If you believe in the Gospel what you like, and reject what you don't like, it is not the Gospel you believe, but yourself.

What cannot be communicated to the [m]other cannot be communicated to the self.

To ascribe feeling is usually to make a prediction about subsequent behaviour.

Whoever may still be sceptical whether knowledge of animal behaviour can help our understanding of man can find no support from Freud.

Despite the mayhem that followed, Bruno found that he was still holding Shmuel's hand in his own and nothing in the world would have persuaded him to let go.

Maybe there were no villains in my mother's story at all. Just men and women, trying to do their best by each other. And failing.

only the victims and survivors can truly comprehend the awfulness of that time and place; the rest of us live on the other side of the fence, staring through from our own comfortable place, trying in our own clumsy ways to make sense of it all.

I remember a friend of mine once telling me that we hate what we fear in ourselves

Just because a man glances up at the sky at night does not make him an astronomer, you know.

It's as if she understood completely the condition of loneliness and how it undermines us all, forcing us to make choices that we know are wrong for us.

J)ust because your version of normal isn't the same as someone else's version doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with you.

But still there are moments when a brother and sister can lay down their instruments of torture for a moment and speak as civilized human beings and Bruno decided to make this one of those moments.

Since the earliest period of our life was preverbal, everything depended on emotional interaction. Without someone to reflect our emotions, we had no way of knowing who we were.

And what I'm conscious of now is of being part of a family. We don't have to explain anything to each other, we understand without words. And I am noting now, amidst my grief, that the men are sipping whisky and the women are sipping sherry.

If, by contrast, you think that uncovering your mistakes is one of the best ways to revise and improve your understanding of the world, then this is actually a highly optimistic insight.

us measure progress not by what is discovered but rather by the growing list of mysteries that remind us of how little we really know.

Cancer will be understood properly only by positioning it within the great sweep of evolutionary history.

A total synthesis of all human knowledge will not result in huge libraries filled with books, in fantastic amounts of data stored on servers. There's no value any more in amount, in quantity, in explanation. For a total synthesis of human knowledge, use the interrogative.

to have beliefs different from ours.

Filters fail when they know us too well and when they don't know us well enough.

Third, we are able to look at the causal skein of mental illness and unravel it, either by longitudinal studies—the same people over time—or experimental studies, which would get rid of third variables.

that's the way of all good explanations. The better they are, the more questions they raise.