Quotes About Understanding

Survival, though, means more than going on. It means understanding the past and finding a way to subdue it, to reconcile it, to overcome it.

The true spirit of conversation consists in building on another man's observation, not overturning it.

Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.

I make it a point never to argue with people for whose opinion I have no respect.

The helpful thought for which you look Is written somewhere in a book.

When people are finding meaning in things - beware.

Explaining something makes it go away, so to speak; what's important is left after you have explained everything else.

Gene would be the first to tell you it doesn't matter what alien race you're talking about, how hideous they seem to be. There are no bad aliens; each of them has a culture that must be defined, recognized, and appreciated for what it is.

He that cannot forgive others, breaks the bridge over which he must pass himself; for every man has need to be forgiven.

We can only understand what we can name.

There is always something about them that evades the understanding, and I have tried to remain aware that, as Paul Valéry has put it, "The power of verse is derived from an indefinable harmony between what it says and what it is. Indefinable is essential to the definition.

Learn about pines from the pine, and about bamboo from the bamboo," the seventeenth-century master of haiku, Matsuo Bash?, wrote in a series of insightful reflections on poetry. I would extend Bash?'s wisdom about nature, and about the poetry of nature in particular, to include the particular nature of poetry: learn about poetry from the poem .

In order to really enjoy a dog, one doesn't merely try to train him to be semihuman. The point of it is to open oneself to the possibility of becoming partly a dog.

In order to really enjoy a dog, one doesn't merely try to train him to be semi-human. The point of it is to open oneself to the possibility of becoming partly a dog.

Education is the vaccine for violence.

Education is a vacine for violence.

Education is the key. But it's the kind of education that we teach that is the key. We don't have it.

You get more churches burned down in the United States in the last two years than in the last hundred, because of the lack of understanding of culture and diversity and the beauty of it.

Stereotypes lose their power when the world is found to be more complex than the stereotype would suggest. When we learn that individuals do not fit the group stereotype, then it begins to fall apart.

The public is not an amorphous mass which can be molded at will, or dictated to. Both business and the public have their own personalities which must somehow be brought into friendly agreement.

It is axiomatic that men who know little are often intolerant of a point of view that is contrary to their own.

One finds that constant quiet sympathy is not only one of the most lovable qualities, but one of the very rarest.

The commonest error of the gifted scholar, inexperienced in teaching, is to expect pupils to know what they have been told. But telling is not teaching. The expression of facts that are in one's mind is a natural impulse when one wishes others to know these facts, just as to cuddle and pat a sick child is a natural impulse. But telling a fact to a child may not cure his ignorance of it any more than patting him will cure his scarlet fever. (p. 61)

While trying harder helps just about everything, telling someone with ADD to try harder is no more helpful than telling someone who is nearsighted to squint harder. It missed the biological point.