Quotes About Understanding

We'd be unfeeling, unconscious zombies if we did.

The history of the object is more relevant than the object itself, if we want to pinpoint what is interesting to us.

Choice is simply a fanciful shorthand for biological processes we do not yet apprehend.

If you're not able to communicate successfully between yourself and yourself, how are you supposed to make it with the strangers outside?

The cartoonist Jules Feiffer, contemplating the communication problem in a nonindustrial context, has said, "Actually, the breakdown is between the person and himself. If you're not able to communicate successfully between yourself and yourself, how are you supposed to make it with the strangers outside?

where perspicacity is weakened,

conclusions:

Don't bother explaining—I've heard all the excuses and the trouble is most of them are true.

It's common platitude that knowledge is neutral but every now and then it would be useful if it was on your side and not theirs.

intelligence and wisdom aren't the same.

There is no barrier so strong as that of ignorance.

He disliked emotion, not because he felt lightly, but because he felt deeply.

I get into a tearing passion about something I know very little about, and when I learn more my passion ebbs away.

The men who knew that he knew what he knew had found him

a "free People think they have a right to an Explanation of the Circumstances which give rise to the Necessity under which they suffer.

I can believe a miracle because I can raise my own arm. I can believe a miracle because I can remember. I can believe it because I can speak and be understood by you. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, Unitarian minister and essayist

It is astonishing how little one feels alone when one loves.

Don't ask me when I first mastered the obvious.

The greatest pleasure in life is to be understood, is it not? But who in the world does an artist like you or me find to understand

Mitch Turner interested him a lot. Until he met Turner, I think he doubted that farang had souls. When he saw what a mess Turner was in, what he called the 'great howl of agony' at the center of this man, he felt he'd understood why the West is the way it is.

I want to venture a hypothesis that, roughly expressed, goes like this: you cannot learn to love yourself until you find something in the world to love; no matter what it is. A dog, a garden, a tree,a flight of birds, a friend...Because what we love in ourselves is ourselves loving.

Sometimes you linger days upon a word, a single, uncontaminated drop of sound; for days it trembles, liquid to the mind, then falls: mere denotation dimming the undertow of language.

To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, to imagine your facts is another.

You must have the bird in your heart before you can find it in the bush.