Quotes About Understanding

Women in general want to be loved for what they are and men for what they accomplish.

Zwei Augen hat man nur und mit hundert soll man sehen

Whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think it properly. The jargon takes over this task.

It is Proust's courtesy to spare the reader the embarrassment of believing himself cleverer than the author.

Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.

Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case.

The only true thoughts are those which do not grasp their own meaning

Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.

Das Bedürfnis, Leiden beredt werden zu lassen, ist Bedingung aller Wahrheit. (The need to lend a voice to suffering [literally: "to let suffering be eloquent"] is the condition of all truth)

It is the innermost nature of true interpretation to contribute to the death of its object.

The utopia of knowledge would be to open up the non-conceptual with concepts, without making it their equal.

Une philosophie transformée devrait casser cette prétention, ne plus faire croire à elle-même et aux autres qu'elle dispose de l'infini. Mais au lieu de cela c'est elle qui, subtilement comprise deviendrait infinie dans la mesure où elle dédaignerait de se fixer dans un corpus de théorèmes dénombrables.

Der Splitter in deinem Auge ist das beste Vergröserungsglas.

Aufgearbeitet wäre die Vergangenheit erst dann, wenn die Ursachen des Vergangenen beseitigt wären. Nur weil die Ursachen fortbestehen, ward sein Bann bis heute nicht gebrochen.

The detached observer is as much entangled as the active participant; the only advantage of the former is insight into his entanglement, and the infinitesimal freedom that lies in knowledge as such.

DIANA: Well, how was I supposed to know that? MARY: Maybe because we mentioned it over and over again? DIANA: You're assuming that I listen.

Spectacular cases are usually simpler, and less interesting, than they initially appear.

If the Apostle justly prohibits the use of unknown tongues in the church, much less would he have tolerated these artificial musical performances, which are addressed to the ear only, and seldom strike the understanding, even of the performers themselves.

Epistemology is the study of knowledge. By what conduit do we know what we know?

Tocqueville understood, as few modern writers do, that pauperism is above all a psychological, not an economic, condition.

We need everyone who suffers to be a victim because only thus can we maintain our pretense to universal understanding and experience the warm glow of our own compassion, so akin to the warmth that a strong, stiff drink imparts in the cold.

The college 'should teach the arts of human intercourse; the art of understanding other people's lives and minds, and the little arts of talk, of dress, of cookery that are allied with them.' Not being a systematic thinker, to put it kindly, Mrs. Woolf here fails to realise that she is proposing to enclose women in precisely the little domestic world from which she also claims to be rescuing them.

Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.

In order to have wisdom we must have ignorance.