Quotes About Understanding

Actually, of course, it didn't explain anything, but whenever doctors are confused about something, which is really more frequently than any of us would do well to think about, they always snatch at something in the vicinity of the case and add, That explains it.

For the pedant, dates are deities, worthy of worship, but for the true social historian, they are minutiae only, a shorthand, convenient reminders and no more. You do not ask a Titanic survivor, 'Let me see now, just exactly when was that?' You ask him this: 'What was it like? How did you feel?' And that is the job of the social historian: to make the past vibrant for the present; to emotionally involve those of us who were not there. And to make us understand.

I don't know how to describe it so I won't, but if you died and in your will you asked for your ashes to be spread gently on the Grand Canal at midnight with a full moon, everyone would know this about you - you loved and understood beauty.

You keep saying that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

sorry about that, Helen)

Oh, Westley, I didn't mean that, I didn't, I didn't, not a single syllabub of it." Now Westley knew that she meant to say "not a single syllable of it," because a syllabub was something you ate, with cream and wine mixed in together to form the base. But he also knew an apology when he heard one. So he held her very close, and shut his loving eyes, and only whispered, "I knew it was false, believe me, every single syllabub.

But, to judge the action fairly, we must transport ourselves to the age when it happened.

So there are no nontheologians; there is just good theology and bad theology.

The Bible's concern is not if we shall believe but what we shall believe.

A sovereign, creative, truthful God is not threatened by our human attempts to describe and better to understand the nature and purposes of God.

The art of conversation is the art of hearing as well as of being heard.

Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own. [ The Sick Chamber ( The New Monthly Magazine , August 1830)]

We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts.

I have one friend, a dog; yes, I would sooner have old Pepper than the rest of Creation together. He, at least understands me-and has sense enough to leave me alone when I am in my dark moods.

A good author insists on being accepted on his own terms, and audiences must bicker awhile before they're willing to give in. One learns not to be resentful about this condition but to credit it to human nature.

I also realized that God was not only just, but merciful. He knew we were weak and that we all found it easier to be stinkers than good sons of God, not only as kids but all through our lives. That clear picture, I'm sure, would be important to any kid who hates a teacher, or resents a person in charge. This picture of my relationship to man and God was what helped relieve me of bitterness and rancor and a desire to get even.

Too often have we believed the old lie that says we're bad, we're perverted, we're abominations. But those who spread the lie don't know. They don't know how we love, how we hurt, how we live.

It would probably astound each of us beyond measure to be let into his neighbors mind and to find how different the scenery was there from that of his own.

Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.

Wisdom is seeing something in a non-habitual manner.

Psychology is the science of mental life

Our science is a drop, our ignorance a sea.

To know is one thing, and to know for certain that we know is another. One

We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold.