Quotes About Understanding

Le mot 'chat' signifie 'la chose blanche qui ronronne' (lors du cours sur la Métaphysique des Espèces Naturelles, Collège de France 2013-2014)

Debemos ser capaces —algo extremadamente difícil— de decir no sólo sí o no a una determinada realidad y también a las personas amadas, sino que es necesario continuar amándolas incluso condenando sus acciones y continuar condenando sus acciones aunque sin dejar de amarlas.

it gave me a new appreciation for objective appraisal

Indeed, while experiences and information can be good teachers, there are many times in life where we simply cannot afford to learn on the job. You don't want to have to go through multiple marriages to learn how to be a good spouse. Or wait until your last child has grown to master parenthood. This is why theory can be so valuable: it can explain

And for her, now, replaced by the plain language of the dogs, who in a few syllables have everything to say.

As anyone who has ever been around a cat for any length of time well knows, cats have enormous patience with the limitations of the human mind. They realize that, whether they like it or not, they are simply going to have to put up with what to them are excruciatingly slow mental processes, that we humans have embarrassingly low I.Q.'s, and that probably because of these defects, we have an infuriating inability to understand, let alone follow, even the simplest and most explicit of directions.

What this world needs is a new kind of army — the army of the kind.

As anyone who has ever been around a cat for any length of time well knows cats have enormous patience with the limitations of the human kind.

You cannot expect everything even from the friendliest cat. It is still a cat.

Often, simply knowing the answer is the largest hurdle to overcome when formulating a proof.

Without consciousness and intelligence, the universe would lack meaning.

Man's inability to understand and appreciate the thought and viewpoint of another man would be a stumbling block which no amount of mechanical ability could overcome.

And yet he had learned to submerge that sense of horror, to disregard the outward appearance of it, to regard all life as brother life, to meet all things as people.

Well," said Winslowe, moving over to plant himself behind the wheel, "it don't matter much what any of us are, just so we get along with one another. If some of the nations would only take a lesson from some small neighborhood like ours—a lesson in how to get along—the world would be a whole lot better.

It was a hopeless thing, he thought, this obsession of his to present the people of the Earth as good and reasonable. For in many ways they were neither good nor reasonable; perhaps because they had not as yet entirely grown up. They were smart and quick and at times compassionate and even understanding, but they failed lamentably in many other ways.

But such an affection for what doesn't fit and won't comport, reality out of place...

Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.

Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.

What we call our data are really our own constructions of other people's constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to.

Understanding a people's culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity...It renders them accessible: setting them in the frame of their own banalities, it dissolves their opacity.

All ethnography is part philosophy and a good deal of the rest is confession.

if you want to understand what a science is, you should look in the first in­stance not at its theories or its findings, and certainly not at what its apologists say about it; you should look at what the practitioners of it do.

Believing with Max Weber that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.

He sank his head in his hand to blot out the light. For the first time in his life he suffered from more than a personal sense of loss. He suffered because others suffered.