Quotes About Understanding

It is not always possible to know, when you make a note of an event, or a state of mind, how this may strike someone perhaps ten thousand years later.

I'm always astounded at the way we automatically look at what divides and separates us. We never look at what people have in common. If you see it, black and white people, both sides look to see the differences, they don't look at what they have together. Men and women, and old and young, and so on. And this is a disease of the mind, the way I see it. Because in actual fact, men and women have much more in common than they are separated.

If we were to put into practice what we know ... but that is the point.

I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature inaccurate.

Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.

But one may acquire what MacIntyre calls a "second first language," a language which is learned in the same way that a child learns to use the native tongue. A missionary or an anthropologist who really hopes to understand and enter into the adopted culture will not do so by trying to learn the language in the way a tourist uses a phrasebook and a dictionary.

The value of the word contextualization is that it suggests the placing of the gospel in the total context of a culture at a particular moment, a moment that is shaped by the past and looks to the future.

Natural theology, in other words, is in no way a step on the way toward the theology which takes God's self-revelation as its starting point. It is more likely, in fact, to lead in the opposite direction.

The difference is not between the use of reason and its abandonment; it is the difference between two ways of understanding the world, one in which the self is sovereign and the other in which I understand myself only in a relation of mutuality with other selves.

But we do not reach truth unless we allow ourselves to be exposed to and drawn by a truth which is beyond our present understanding.

A study of one particular current helps us to understand one aspect of Judaism, while the study of all four discussed here provides a quite comprehensive picture of Judaism - albeit, a complex picture, like a mosaic with many different parts.

We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are.

Eu sei o que é amor, Joaquim. Eu sei aqui no meu peito, como um punhal. Um punhal cravado para sempre. Ele sorriu, um riso triste. — Amor não é ferida, Manuela. Não precisa ser...

Few, save the poor, feel for the poor.

A man above thirty cannot enter into the wild visions of an enthusiastic girl.

Our own faults are those we are the first to detect, and the last to forgive, in others.

Truth is like the philosopher's stone, a thing not to be discovered.

I still believe that a day of understanding will come for each of us, however far away it may be. We will understand as we see the tragedies that today darken and dampen the presence of heaven for us take their proper place in God's great plan—a plan so overwhelming, magnificent, and joyful, we will laugh with wonder and delight. Arthur Christopher Bacon

I like Shakespeare, but I never know what the hell is going on.

Friends can be said to "fall in like" with as profound a thud as romantic partners fall in love.

That was one thing about books: once you read them they couldn't be unread.

Do you promise to hate my parents as much as I do?" "Oh, absolutely," Quentin said. "Maybe even more.

Probably falling in love is always a little like that: You discover that one other person who understands what no one else seems to, which is that the world is broken and can never, ever be fixed. You can stop pretending, at least for a little while. You can both admit it, if only to each other.

He and Janet talked like this all the time. The Fillorians didn't really get it, they thought High King Eliot and Queen Janet hated each other, but the truth was that in Quentin's absence Janet had become his principal confidante. Eliot supposed it was partly because they both found real romantic intimacy elusive and kind of uninteresting, so usually neither of them had a serious boyfriend, and they had to turn to each other for intelligent companionship.