Quotes About Understanding

If we don't understand our tools, then there is a danger that we will become the tool of our tools, Plato said, which I thought was a very astute observation, especially considering how little it turned out that he actually knew about Google or really anything about the Internet. I

In fact, it's the very impersonality of impersonal knowledge that renders such knowledge the most ethically potent of all.

Philosophical progress is invisible because it is incorporated into our points of view. What was tortuously secured by complex argument becomes widely shared intuition, so obvious that we forget its provenance. We don't see it, because we see with it.

What is it precisely, that they are doing when they are doing science. Are they refining their instruments for observation or discovering new aspects of reality?

We achieve a life worth living by understanding how the cosmos achieved an existence worth existing. The impersonally sublime is internalized into personal virtue. Plato: For measure and proportion manifest themselves in all areas as beauty and virtue

Conclusions that philosophers first establish by way of torturous reasoning have a way, over time, of leaking into shared knowledge.

We also need to be willing to confront the emotions that may exist as a result of everything that's been passed down to us.

As you work to understand your emotions—including those of the family members who came before you—and put together the pieces of your past that have made you who you are, your healing will begin.

A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.

Kindness and gentleness never had a gender, and neither did empathy.

We make ourselves large or small, here or there, in our empathies.

To feel for someone enlarges the self and then the self shares risks and pains.

To use language is to enter into the territory of categories, which are as necessary as they are dangerous.

To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story.

No matter how deeply you come to know a place, you can keep coming back to know it more.

Why is it that white people find it easier to think like a mountain than like a person of colour?' Carl Anthony quoted by Rebecca Solnit

If it's not clear enough in the piece, I love it when people things to me they know and I'm interested in but don't yet know. It's when they explain things to me I know and they don't that the conversation goes awry.

How long does it take to see something, to know someone? If you put in years, you realize how little you grasped at the start, even when you thought you knew. We move through life mostly not seeing what is around us, not knowing who is around us, not understanding the forces at play, not understanding ourselves. Unless we stay with it, and maybe this is a movie about staying with it.

James Baldwin famously wrote, "If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.

We live inside each other's thoughts and works.

Discrimination is training in not identifying or empathizing with someone because they are different in some way, in believing the differences mean everything and common humanity nothing.

The unexamined life is not worth living, as the aphorism goes, but perhaps an honorable and informed life requires examining others' lives, not just one's own. Perhaps we do not know ourselves unless we know others. And if we do, we know that nobody is nobody.

To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put ourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story. Which means that a place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller's art, and then a way of traveling from here to there.

We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don't. Sometimes I think these pretenses at authoritative knowledge are failures of language: the language of bold assertion is simpler, less taxing, than the language of nuance and ambiguity