Quotes About Understanding

Frog walked into the house. It was dark. All the shutters were closed. 'Toad, where are you?' called Frog. 'Go away,' said the voice from a corner of the room.

In the past, before the physiology of abdominal training was well understood, bodybuilders used to do a lot of "conventional" abdominal exercises such as Sit-Ups and Leg Raises. Unfortunately, those are not primary abdominal exercises but instead work the iliopsoas muscles—the hip flexors.

How much do you know about Shakespeare?'' I once asked a friend who has committed much of her life to studying the Bard. She replied, ''Not as much as he knows about me''. Remember this the next time someone tells you literature is useless.

Well, how do you understand things or people? It is a question Shreve himself asks, and then answers by referring precisely to Sutpen's opposite number, the little dream-woman Rosa Coldfield: "What was it the old dame, the Aunt Rosa, told you about how there are some things that just have to be whether they are or not, have to be a damn sight more than some other things that maybe

There is little chance that meteorologists can solve the mysteries of weather until they gain an understanding of the mutual attraction of rain and weekends.

Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot see physically with his eyes.

With any work worth its salt, you have to trust the author enough to take its measure. And if you apply too many preconceptions, you are not taking its measure.

I know this is insane, but I somehow wish I had been in Auschwitz with my parents so I could really know what they lived through! I guess it's some kind of guilt about having had an easier life than they did.

I have never heard any of your lectures, but from what I can learn I should say that for people who like the kind of lectures you deliver, they are just the kind of lectures such people like. Yours respectfully, O. Abe.

Four minutes of eye contact brings people closer to each other better than everything else.

We must reach out our hand in friendship and dignity both to those who would befriend us and those who would be our enemy.

Logic always seems to be telling us, in language quite unnecessarily technical, what we understood much better before it was explained.

He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.

I was beginning to realize that zazen was not a cure-all. People who attain a certain degree of understanding of zazen begin to understand zazen, period. I had to remind myself not to expect Joko to be equipped to advise me how to live my life or to decide important ethical questions such as the proper stance of religion toward war.

Cats have an infallible understanding of total concentration — and get between you and it.

although the universe itself isn't a conscious entity, it possesses the raw materials that, when properly set into motion, create consciousness. It has the ability to create intelligent life, which is capable of understanding the universe... It can know itself indirectly

We don't have an anger problem in American politics. We have a contempt problem. . . . If you listen to how people talk to each other in political life today, you notice it is with pure contempt. When somebody around you treats you with contempt, you never quite forget it. So if we want to solve the problem of polarization today, we have to solve the contempt problem.

Almost no one is ever insulted into agreement.

We don't have an anger problem in American politics. We have a contempt problem. . . . If you listen to how people talk to each other in political life today, you notice it is with pure contempt. When somebody around you treats you with contempt, you never quite forget it. So if we want to solve the problem of polarization today, we have to solve the contempt problem.

Crystallized intelligence, relying as it does on a stock of knowledge, tends to increase with age through one's forties, fifties, and sixties—and does not diminish until quite late in life, if at all.

There is evidence that as we become less exposed to opposing viewpoints, we become less logically competent as people.

If we want more unity and less contempt, however, we need to get out of our comfort zones, go where we are not welcome, and spend time talking and interacting with people with whom we disagree—not on lightweight stuff like sports and food, but on hard moral things.

After all, as the saying goes, "Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad."[*

We speed past the questions that would help us get to know another person's story and instead immediately look to the places of greatest difference and disagreement.