Quotes About Understanding

Talent in itself meant little; having the right people to appreciate it was everything.

The frontiers of knowledge in the various fields of our subject are expanding at such a rate that, work as hard as one can, one finds oneself further and further away from an understanding of the whole.

Strange about parents. We have such easy access to them and such daunting problems of communication.

Quotations will tell the full measure of meaning, if you have enough of them.

It is our relationship to the symbol, the Word, that is important.

At that moment I realized the true nature of hatred. It is contagious.

Within South Korean Christian churches, there has been an explosion of ministries of pastoral care and counseling in recent decades. Every family has its own story of trauma to tell, and many people seek understanding of how they can find healing for their trauma. In situations of trauma, people seek religious answers to why things have happened as they have, and what resources will bring the possibility of surviving and thriving again. Within the interreligious context

There are silences that can be heard, even from the dead and from the severely oppressed. Much is recoverable from an apparently forgotten past. Sensitive and faithful historians can learn much of what has been lost, and much therefore that can be continued.

Infinite players have rules, they just do not forget that rules are an expression of agreement and not a requirement for agreement.

When we forget that knowledge rises from ignorance and think of it instead as a way of overcoming ignorance, knowledge can have the ironic effect of limiting our vision.

Speaker and listener understand each other not because they have the same knowledge about something, and not because they have established a likeness of mind, but because they know "how to go on" with each other (Wittgenstein).

Infinite speakers do not give voice to another, but receive it from another. Infinite speakers do not therefore appeal to a world as audience, do not speak before a world, but present themselves as an audience by way of talking with others. Finite speech informs another about the world—for the sake of being heard. Infinite speech forms a world about the other—for the sake of listening.

What can be explained can also be predicted, if one knows the initial events and the laws covering their succession.

This is as much as to say that nature does have a voice, and its voice is no different from our own. We can then presume to speak for the unspeakable.

At its root all language has the character of metaphor, because no matter what it intends to be about it remains language, and remains absolutely unlike whatever it is about. This means that we can never have the falcon, only the word "falcon." To say that we have the falcon, and not the "falcon," is to presume again that we know precisely what it is we have, that we can see it in its entirety, and that we can speak as nature itself.

The unspeakability of nature is the very possibility of language.

The physicists who look at their objects within their limitations teach physics; those who see the limitations they place around their objects teach "physics." For them physics is a poiesis.

We understand nature as source when we understand ourselves as source. We abandon all attempts at an explanation of nature when we see that we cannot be explained, when our own self-origination cannot be stated as fact. We behold the irreducible otherness of nature when we behold ourselves as its other.

When I forsake my genius and speak to you as though I were another, I also speak to you as someone you are not and somewhere you are not. I address you as audience, and do not expect you to respond as the genius you are.

We cannot have a precise understanding of what it means to be the winner of a contest until we can place the game in the absolute dimensions of a world.

Finite players need the world to provide an absolute reference for understanding themselves; simultaneously, the world needs the theater of finite play to remain a world.

The paradox of genius exposes us directly to the dynamic of open reciprocity, for if you are the genius of what you say to me, I am the genius of what I hear you say. What you say originally I can hear only originally. As you surrender the sound on your lips, I surrender the sound in my ear. Each of us has relinquished to the other what has been relinquished to the other.

Explanation sets the need for further inquiry aside; narrative invites us to rethink what we thought we knew.

The assumption guiding our struggle against nature is that deep within itself nature contains a structure, an order, that is ultimately intelligible to the human understanding