Quotes About Understanding

They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right.

I apologize if my limbic system has misinterpreted your gesture of emotional support.

Just aiming a speely input device, or a Farspark chambre, or whatever you call it... a speelycaptor... at something doesn't collect what is meaningful to me. I need someone to gather it in with all their senses, mix it round in their head, and make it over into words.

Once you found the math in a thing, you knew everything about it, and you could manipulate it to your heart's content with nothing more than a pencil and a napkin.

You have responsibilities, now, Bob. You must lose this naive understanding of violence! You are embarrassin' me in front of the lads! You can't play by their rules or they'll win unfailingly! You don't engage in courtly play-fightin' with one such as this. You get a great friggin' tree-branch and keep hittin' him with it until he dies.

The Bibliotheque du Roi then gives you the closest thing that currently exists to God's understanding of the world. And yet with a bigger library we could come ever so much closer.

Izzy was full of people who were skewed toward the Asperger's end of the social spectrum, and there was no better way to get them to start talking than to ask them a technical question.

Reader, if you don't know what a database is, rest assured that an explanation of the concept would in no way increase your enjoyment in reading this account.

Every parent of a teenager gets used to it: the moment in a child's life when he or she decides that certain facts are just too much trouble to explain to Mom or Dad. The parents can't, and needn't, know every last little thing. They just have to accept this, be content with what they can glean on their own, and move on.

No linear indexing system is adequate to express the multi-dimensionality of knowledge," Dr. Waterhouse reminds him.

Your ability to have empathy with the Geometer—to imagine what it would be like to be someone else—isn't a mere courtesy. It is an innate process of consciousness.

One thing Waterhouse likes about these Brits is that when they don't know what the hell you are talking about, they are at least open to the possibility that it might be their fault.

Even though we didn't say anything, we were in dialog: a peregrin dialog, meaning two equals wandering around trying to work something out, as opposed to a suvinian dialog where a fid is being taught by a mentor, or a Periklynian dialog, which is combat.

I don't know how my face conveyed that information, or what kind of internal wiring in my grandmother's mind enabled her to accomplish this incredible feat. To condense fact from the vapor of nuance. Condense fact from the vapor of nuance. Hiro has never forgotten the sound of her speaking those words, the feeling that came over him as he realized for the first time how smart Juanita was.

It was humanly impossible to extend to seven billion people the full sympathy that each of them deserved.

It registered on the mind as a blunt impression that could be talked about only by smearing it into some gray word like "complicated.

But for the moment it was just a pattern of sensory impressions painted on the screen of her memory, not soaked in yet, not understood, not even granted the dignity of having really happened.

Like every other state-of-the-art conference room AV system in the history of the world, it failed to work on the first go and so it was necessary to summon someone who understood how it worked; and like all such persons he could not be found.

Bolor-Erdene urged Dinah to address her as Bo. She was obviously of Far Eastern stock, and yet there was something in her eyes and cheekbones that did not look precisely Chinese. Dinah's preliminary googling had already told her that Bo was Mongolian. Yuri

Yur heaved a sigh, then continued in a more moderate tone: "Never mind. I see it now. It's some kind of Purpose thing. Above my pay grade. You should have just told me." He drew himself up and saluted. "What are my orders, sir?

there was something willfully idiotic in going to an unknown country, ignoring its people, their languages, art, its beasts and butterflies, flowers, herbs, trees, ruins, et cetera, and reducing it all to a few lumps of heavy matter un the center of a dish.

Every parent of a teenager gets used to it: the moment in a child's life when he or she decides that certain facts are just too much trouble to explain to Mom or Dad. The parents can't, and needn't, know every last little thing.

People are my books," Ty said. "But I did bring a couple, in case the people all go to sleep.

Sergeant Major," Arjun said quietly, "there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Yur snorted. "Is that a fancy way of saying it's above my pay grade, sir?