Quotes About Understanding

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If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said. -- Speaking to a Senate Committee in 1987, as quoted in the Guardian Weekly, November 4, 2005.

The worse they are the more they see beauty in each other.

Just as one will not get far on the road to happiness by predefining the characteristics of happiness and then going to look for them, we will not grasp what it means to be the church in our time by beginning with church questions, even if they are questions about the church's health, effectiveness, or its natural development!

when we do not know, or when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts."*5

T. S. Eliot wrote almost a century ago about a phenomenon that he believed to be the product of the nineteenth century: "When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when everyone knows a little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about or not.

You can reread not from love or hatred but from a sense, often inchoate, that there's more to this book than you have ben yet able to receive.

It's what you're reading that matters, and how you're reading it, not the speed with which you're getting through it. Reading is supposed to be about the encounter with other minds, not an opportunity to return to the endlessly appealing subject of Me.

Our goal as adults is not to love all books alike, or as few as possible, but rather to love as widely and as well as our limited selves will allow.

Perspective is worth 80 IQ points

Marriage is nature's way of keeping us from fighting with strangers.

If you want to read about love and marriage, you've got to buy two separate books.

Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.

A girl becomes a wife with her eyes wide open. She knows that those sweetest words, 'I take thee to be my wedded husband,' really mean, 'I promise thee to cook three meals a day for 60 years thee will I clean up after thee will I talk to even when thou art not listening thee will I worry about, cry over and take all manner of hurts from.'

We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from another's vantage point, as if new, it may still take the breath away.

Compassion is the feeling of empathy which the pain of one being of itself awakens in another; and the higher and more human the beings are, the more keenly attuned are they to re-echo the note of suffering which, like a voice from heaven, penetrates the heart.

ANYONE WHO HAS PREJUDICES and whose perceptions are colored by self-interest will never see the truth in any area in which his bias operates. Only when his bias is removed will he be able to understand the truth. —RABBI ELIYAHU DESSLER (1892–1953)

I have always found that actively loving saves one from a morbid preoccupation with the shortcomings of society.

The conception of two people living together for twenty-five years without having a cross word suggests a lack of spirit only to be admired in sheep.

Birds are sensitive to mispronunciation, even more sensitive than the French.

We can never fully understand the hearts and minds of people . . . unless we can speak directly to them in their own language so that the implications, not just the words, come through clearly.

Many seem to think that, first of all, the Bible has to be explained, but that is not true. It has to be believed and obeyed! We fail to see the tremendous difference between knowing the Word of God and knowing the God of the Word. Conferences, rallies, missionary conventions, and church services come and go, and we remain unchanged. We are often just a group of unbelieving believers, perhaps never so well equipped, but never so poorly endued.

One of the reasons dogs are so loved is that they don't set the bar too high for their humans.

I'm always more at home with those who are seeking answers than with those who say they have them.