Quotes About Understanding

Grief has this that is noble in it—it accepts all sympathy, come whence it may. She

My shutting the door won't keep him from coming back. Your shutting the door will. Have you the courage to shut it? Are you fond enough of him not to stand in his light?

It is a habit of mine always to give up to Miss Halcombe. I find, by experience, that it saves noise.

Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.

History is mostly guessing, the rest is prejudice.

To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.

The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding

Facts replaced understanding; and knowledge, split into a thousand isolated fragments, no longer generated wisdom.

There are not many things finer in our murderous species than this noble curiosity, this restless and reckless passion to understand.

Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.

The historian always oversimplifies, and hastily selects a manageable minority of facts and faces out of a crowd of souls and events whose multitudinous complexity he can never quite embrace or comprehend.

All science is a charted ignorance and belongs to Maya.

Human behavior, says Plato, flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.

But even democracy ruins itself by excess—of democracy. Its basic principle is the equal right of all to hold office and determine public policy. This is at first glance a delightful arrangement; it becomes disastrous because the people are not properly equipped by education to select the best rulers and the wisest courses (588). "As to the people they have no understanding, and only repeat what their rulers are pleased to tell them" (

Perhaps, in return for conquest, arrogance and spoliation, India will teach us the tolerance and gentleness of the mature mind, the quiet content of the unacquisitive soul, the calm of the understanding spirit and a unifying, pacifying love for all living things.

but he had gained a perspective of thought in which every extreme was seen as a half-truth

A sense of humor, being born of perspective, bears a near kinship to philosophy; each is the soul of the other.

The first lesson that the sages of the Upanishads teach their selected pupils is the inadequacy of the intellect. How can this feeble brain, that aches at a little calculus, ever hope to understand the complex immensity of which it is so transitory a fragment?

Intolerance is the natural concomitant of strong faith; tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous. Plato

Crafty men condemn studies, simple men admire them, and wise men use them; for they teach not their own use; but that is a wisdom without them, and above them, won by observation.

For what is philosophy but an art - one more attempt to give significant form to the chaos of experience?

Prudens quæstio dimidium scientiæ—to know what to ask is already to know half.

Read the book not all at once, but in small portions at many sittings. And having finished it, consider that you have but begun to understand it. Read then some commentary, like Pollock's Spinoza, or Martineau's Study of Spinoza; or, better, both. Finally, read the Ethics again; it will be a new book to you. When you have finished it a second time you will remain forever a lover of philosophy.

Read the book not all at once, but in small portions at many sittings. And having finished it, consider that you have but begun to understand it. Read then some commentary, like Pollock's Spinoza, or Martineau's Study of Spinoza, or better, both. Finally, read the Ethics again; it will be a new book to you. When you have finished it a second time you will remain forever a lover of philosophy.