Quotes About Understanding

Only a dog would lick a finger pointed in anger.

You can sometimes tell more by a man's silence and the set of his head than by what he says. By such signs you can tell, for instance, what he thinks of his wife . . .

A lifetime's knowledge shimmers on the face of the land in the mind of a person who knows. The history of a place is the mind of an old man or an old woman who knows it.

It is useless to try to adjudicate a long-standing animosity by asking who started it or who is the most wrong. The only sufficient answer is to give up the animosity and try forgiveness, to try to love our enemies and to talk to them and (if we pray) to pray for them. If we can't do any of that, then we must begin again by trying to imagine our enemies' children who, like our children, are in mortal danger because of enmity that they did not cause.

To remember, to hear and remember, is to stop and walk on again to a livelier, surer measure. It is dangerous to remember the past only for its own sake, dangerous to deliver a message you did not get.

We younger ones began to see that we knew things that never had not been known.

Our human and earthly limits, properly understood, are not confinements but rather inducements to formal elaboration and elegance, to fullness of relationship and meaning.

The significance - and ultimately the quality - of the work we do is determined by our understanding of the story in which we are taking part.

Even old, your husband is the young man you remember now. Even dead, he is the man you remember, not as he was but as he is, alive still in your love. Death is a sort of lens, though I used to think of it as a wall or a shut door. It changes things and makes them clear. Maybe it is the truest way of knowing this dream, this brief and timeless life.

but we didn't speak of what was bothering us the most. Maybe we didn't need to. It couldn't have been "talked out." It had to be worn out.

He stands under them, looks up, sees, knows, and knows that he does not know.

One morning when he was about thirteen, Den and I were in the barn doing the before-breakfast chores. I was in the milking stall, Den in the driveway. He must have been thinking about Maury, for after a while he said, Dad, Maury Telleen is not very tall. Did you ever notice that? Yes, I said. And probably I was about to tell him he should mind his manners, but he wasn't finished. He said, But you never think of him as a little man. Did you ever notice that? Yes, I said. I have noticed that.

The theologian William E. Hull, worrying over the destructive animosities that divide religious organizations, asked, "How can we avoid the wrangling that breeds hostility?" And he answered: "By seeking clarity rather than victory" (Beyond the Barriers, p. 169).

Teaching as a purpose, as such, is difficult to prescribe or talk about because the thing it is proposing to make is usually something so vague as "understanding.

Counting noses, Bess missed Andy and went to look for him. She found him finally in the dining room, in the corner at the end of the sideboard, crying. The knowledge of it passed over us all. He didn't know, as we grownups knew, what the war meant and might mean. He had only understood that what we were that day was lovely and could not last.

There was nothing glancing or sidling about the way he looked at you. He looked right through your eyes, right into you, as a man looks at you who is willing for you to look right into him.

And so our reclamation project has been, for me, less a matter of idealism or morality than a kind of self-preservation. A destructive history, once it is understood as such, is a nearly insupportable burden. Understanding it is a disease of understanding, depleting the sense of efficacy and paralyzing effort, unless it finds healing work." Excerpt From The World-Ending Fire Wendell Berry This material may be protected by copyright.

Death is a sort of lens, thought I used to think of it as a wall or shut door. It changes things and makes them clear.

I lost no time, of course, in telling him about the book I wanted to write. Not, by then, to my surprise, he readily understood what I had in mind and what my needs and problems were going to be. Our talk was not only thoroughly enjoyable and immediately useful; it was also an immense relief. If it was possible for a person of my loyalties and convictions to find one friend and ally, it might be possible to find others. Apparently I was not as odd as I had feared.

If a soft answer turneth away wrath, maybe no answer stirreth wrath up.

Respect, I think, always implies imagination - the ability to see one another, across our inevitable differences, as living souls.

The love he bore to me was his own, but also it was a love that had been borne to him, by people he knew, people I now knew, people he loved. That, I think, is what put tears in his eyes when he looked at me. He must have wondered if I would love those people too. Well, as it turned out, I did. And I would know them as he had never known them, for longer than he knew them. I knew them old, in their final years and days. I know them dead.

Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.

It was like falling in love, only more than that; we knew too much by then for it to be only that. It was knowing that love was what it was, and life would not complete it and death would not stop it.