Quotes About Understanding

We - as readers or writers, tellers or listeners - understand each other, we share knowledge of the structures of our myths, we comprehend the logic of symbols, largely because we have access to the same swirl of story. We have only to reach out into the air and pluck a piece of it.

Reading...is a full-contact sport; we crash up against the wave of words with all of our intellectual, imaginative, and emotional resources.

Real people are made out of a whole lot of things—flesh, bone, blood, nerves, stuff like that. Literary people are made out of words.

Christ is the unparalleled and unrepeatable Revealer through whom other revelations are best understood

Lord, inspire us to read your Scriptures and meditate upon them day and night. We beg you to give us real understanding of what we need, that we in turn may put its precepts into practice. Yet we know that understanding and good intentions are worthless, unless rooted in your graceful love. So we ask that the words of Scripture may also be not just signs on a page, but channels of grace into our hearts. Origen FURTHER

The word grammar—the first step in the course of classical study that molded all educated men from Plato to Augustine—will be mispronounced by one barbarian tribe as "glamour." In other words, whoever has grammar—whoever can read—possesses magic inexplicable.

Jesus was no ivory-tower philosopher but a down-to-earth man who understood that much of the good of human life is to be found in taste, touch, smell, and the small attentions of one human being for another.

the soul of conversation is sympathy

The quality of your being expresses the correctness of your understanding. Think

Never love unless you can Bear with all the faults of man: Men will sometimes jealous be, Though but little cause they see.

In a certain sense all men are historians.

No man sees far; the most see no farther than their noses.

The eye sees what it brings the power to see.

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

The beginning of all wisdom is to look fixedly on clothes, or even with armed eyesight, till they become transparent.

I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.

Every human being has a right to hear what other wise human beings have spoken to him. It is one of the Rights of Men; a very cruel injustice if you deny it to a man!

Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.

That there should one Man die ignorant who had capacity for Knowledge, this I call a tragedy.

In a controversy, the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves.

It is the heart always that sees, before the head can see.

Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better.

Intellect is not speaking and logicising; it is seeing and ascertaining.

Quoted by Thomas Carlyle) The rude man requires only to see something going on. The man of more refinement must be made to feel. The man of complete refinement must be made to reflect.