Quotes About Understanding

A physician or engineer is free in his thoughts or his actions in the degree in which he knows what he deals with. Perhaps we find here the key to any freedom.

Make wisdom human to the adolescent mind.

We are like a man who goes round a castle seeking in vain for an entrance, and sometimes sketching the facades. If we can ferret out the ultimate nature of our own minds we shall perhaps have the key to the external world. 

This direct perception, this simple and steady looking-upon a thing, is intuition; not any mystic process, but the most direct examination possible to the human mind.

The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding"5

for most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice)

Philosophy directs us first to seek the goods of the mind, and the rest will either be supplied, or not much wanted.

For as no perfect view of a country can be taken from a flat; so it is impossible to discover the remote and deep parts of any science by standing upon the level of the same science, or without ascending to a higher.

The total picture of life is almost too painful for contemplation; life depends on our not knowing it too well.

Man's duty, says the Avesta, is three-fold: "To make him who is an enemy a friend; to make him who is wicked righteous; and to make him who is ignorant learned."76

only a fool would try to compress a hundred centuries into a hundred pages of hazardous conclusions. We proceed.

There is no cure for such antipathies except a broadened education.

Philosophy, however, is for the few, whereas poetry is more useful to the people at large.

For when fear is overcome, curiosity and constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding and embellishment of life.

Bacon had done it, and Campanella had said, with Baconian pithiness, Tantum possumus quantum scimus —"Our power is proportioned to our knowledge." Perhaps

We shall never have any experience which we shall not interpret in terms of space and time and cause; but we shall never have any philosophy if we forget that these are not things, but modes of interpretation and understanding.

So philosophy purifies the will. But philosophy is to be understood as experience and thought, not as mere reading or passive study.

How can we understand man if we do not understand religion?

One must pay a penalty for having a prejudice against obscurity.

Consider education not as the painful accumulation of facts and dates and reigns, nor merely the necessary preparation of the individual to earn his keep in the world, but as the transmission of our mental, moral, technical, and aesthetic heritage as fully as possible to as many as possible, for the enlargement of man's understanding, control, embellishment, and enjoyment of life.

Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.

Do you know," asks Emerson, "the secret of the true scholar? In every man there is something wherein I may learn of him; and In that I am his pupil.

Great men speak to us only so far as we have ears and souls to hear them; only so far as we have in us the roots, at least, of that which flowers out in them.

Kant is the last person in the world whom we should read on Kant.