Quotes About Understanding

Why can't people just sit and read books and be nice to each other?

Depending on the situation, sometimes you can know a person better in ten minutes than someone you have crossed paths with all your life.

Two people can care for each other but not want the same things.

you ask too many questions," snapped Cletus. I kept my gaze on Roman. "that's because I get too few answers.

It's the hardest thing in the world to put yourself in someone else's place, try to really feel what they feel, figure out why they do the things they do. Especially when it's easier to stick a label on something. Or someone.

That the Bible contains more knowledge necessary to man in his present state than any other book in the world.

If you can't write your idea on the back of my calling card, you don't have a clear idea.

To expand our minds and to become more fully civilized members of the human race, we should learn as many different languages as we can. The diversity of tongues is a treasure and a resource for thinking new thoughts.

It is translation, more than speech itself, which provides incontrovertible evidence of the human capacity to think and to communicate thought. We should do more of it.

I express not the word for the word but the sense for the sense.

Translation is another name for the human condition.

But a world in which all intercultural communication was carried out in a single idiom would not diminish the variety of human tongues. It would just make native speakers of the international medium less sophisticated users of language than all others, since they alone would have only one language to think with.

Translation is the opposite of empire

Would we have ever asked what it is that a translator 'carries across' the 'language barrier' if he or she were called a 'turner', 'tongue-man', or 'exchanger'? Probably not.

The real story is the other way around. Without translators, Western dictionaries would not exist.

To try to capture "all the words of a language" is as futile as trying to capture all the drops of water in a flowing river.

The natural way to represent the foreignness of foreign utterances is to leave them in the original, in whole or in part.

The words of law often look like words of the language you speak, but when they are legal terms, they are not.

Translation is not just one thing; how best to do it depends on what you are doing it for.

Among them we cannot possibly include the unfortunate but widespread idea that English is simpler than other languages.

Translation is meaning.

It can be done only by guessing what the context and genre of the utterance are.

Courage is... the knowledge of how to fear what ought to be feared and how not to fear what ought not to be feared.

Courage is a special kind of knowledge the knowledge of how to fear what ought to be feared and how not to fear what ought no to be feared.