Quotes About Understanding

He has passed into the realm of irrational things that you must simply accept, and in the Philippines this is a nearly infinite domain

In layperson's terms: if it has to be dunked in liquid helium to work, I don't understand it. If it's in a rack with fans blowing on it, that's a different story.

and people could only make sense of complicated matters through stories. Likewise

he has come to understand the culture for what it is: a system of etiquette within which it becomes possible for groups of men to live together for years, travel to the ends of the earth, and do all kinds of incredibly weird shit without killing each other or completely losing their minds in the process.

No matter how many times I failed to get what he was talking about, he had this steady faith in my ability to understand what he understood. It was an endearing quality—his only one.

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.

Doob had known for a while that he was not the easiest guy to be related to. During his last ten weeks on Earth, however, he sometimes feared he was pushing his family's patience beyond human limits with his lust for camping.

The average buyer of an OS is not really paying for, and is not especially interested in, the low-level code that allocates memory or writes bytes onto the disk. What we're really buying is a system of metaphors. And--much more important--what we're buying into is the underlying assumption that metaphors are a good way to deal with the world.

Condense fact from the vapor of nuance.

Henry, riding shotgun, made a touching effort to stay awake and then fell into slumber. Henry was a sweet kid and Doob knew that when he woke up he would apologize. But Henry wasn't a parent, and he didn't understand that when you were, almost nothing was more satisfying than seeing your kid sleep.

Grammar is like the walls and bumpers of a pinball machine. Rhetoric is like the flippers of a pinball machine. You control the flippers. The rest of the machine—grammar—controls everything else. If you use the flippers well, you make points. If you fail to image your concepts viably, your ball drops into the black hole of nothingness. If you try to cheat, the machine tilts and you lose—that's like people not understanding your interactions.

Actually, they have not been talking so much as mentioning certain ideas and then leaving the other to work through the implications. This is a highly efficient way to communicate;

some manner of cause-and-effect relationship existed between the rise of scientific knowledge and the decline of magic.

Well, it's all math," he says. "If the math works, why then you should be sure of yourself. That's the whole point of math.

Religion is not for simpletons.

What do you mean?" Yul asked.

Pain results from a judgment you have made about a thing. Remove the judgment and the pain disappears.

When you give your children knowledge, you are telling them what to think. That is, you are telling them what they are supposed to know, what you want them to understand is true. When you give your children wisdom, you do not tell them what to know, or what is true, but, rather, how to get to their own truth.

Expectations ruin relationships.

Truth is created, not discover!

Pain results from a judgement you have made about a thing. Remove the judgement and the pain disappears.

Words may help you understand something. Experience allows you to know. Yet there are some things you cannot experience. So I have given you other tools of knowing. And these are called feelings. And so too, thoughts.

Jesus knew that if he gave people the help they asked for, rather than merely the help he wanted to give, that he was empowering them at the level at which they were ready to receive empowerment.

No one does anything inappropriate, given their model of the world.