Quotes About Understanding

A man's wife can hold him devilish uneasy, if she begins to scold and fret, and perplex him, at a time when he has a full load for a railroad car on his mind already.

I also think the relationship I have with my audience is a lot more complex than what Hitchcock seemed to want his to be - although I think he had more going on under the surface as well.

Listen to the crickets," she said, nodding sagely as she spoke, understanding everything.

Philosophy is surgery; surgery is philosophy.

Faced with the sentence therapistsneedspecialtreatment we need to know if this is a text about sex crimes or about speech pathology before we can correctly read it aloud.

There's a whisper of revolution whenever people really speak to one another and really listen.

The little everyday neglect of imagining other people well can add up to a lifetime of flawed, perverted vision, an expenditure of soul in a waste of emotionalism.

The way a man penetrates the world should be the same way he penetrates his woman: not merely for personal gain or pleasure, but to magnify love, openness, and depth.

One of the deepest feminine desires in intimacy is precisely not to have to always figure it out for her man and guide him.

Just remember that self-discipline is not self-suppression. Suppression is when you resist and fight against your desires, keeping them as buried and unexpressed as possible. Self-discipline is when your highest desires rule your lesser desires, not through resistance, but through loving action grounded in understanding and compassion.

You must listen to your woman more as an oracle than as an advisor

patience was not just a manner, it was the very form of seminar teaching. Columbia's core curriculum had been designed not to enshrine the authority of the lecturing professor (that was something done at Harvard) but to reach understanding through discussion, however clumsy and uncertain. Till this moment, I never knew myself. . . . Vanity, not love has been my folly!

Thus, relativism removes one of our most powerful motives to study the views of the other-the idea that the other might be right and we might be wrong.

It follows that humans, people and knowledge are not only objectively significant: they are by far the most significant phenomena in nature – the only ones whose behaviour cannot be understood without understanding everything of fundamental importance.

But in any case, understanding is one of the higher functions of the human mind and brain, and a unique one. Many other physical systems, such as animals' brains, computers and other machines, can assimilate facts and act upon them. But at present we know of nothing that is capable of understanding an explanation – or of wanting one in the first place – other than a human mind.

Because we are universal explainers, we are not simply obeying our genes. For

Amending the 'data', or rejecting some as erroneous, is a frequent concomitant of scientific discovery, and the crucial 'data' cannot even be obtained until theory tells us what to look for and how and why.

Using our explanations, we 'see' right through the behaviour to the meaning. Parrots copy distinctive sounds; apes copy purposeful movements of a certain limited class. But humans do not especially copy any behaviour. They use conjecture, criticism and experiment to create good explanations of the meaning of things – other people's behaviour, their own, and that of the world in general. That

Copenhagen interpretation Niels Bohr's combination of instrumentalism, anthropocentrism and studied ambiguity, used to avoid understanding quantum theory as being about reality.

The Principle of Optimism All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge.

So we seek explanations that remain robust when we test them against those flickers and shadows, and against each other, and against criteria of logic and reasonableness and everything else we can think of. And when we can change them no more, we have understood some objective truth. And, as if that were not enough, what we understand we then control. It is like magic, only real. We are like gods!

We know that achieving arbitrary physical transformations that are not forbidden by the laws of physics (such as replanting a forest) can only be a matter of knowing how. We know that finding out how is a matter of seeking good explanations.

No somos únicamente «escoria química» pues que, por ejemplo, el comportamiento general de nuestro planeta, nuestra estrella y nuestra galaxia depende de una magnitud física emergente, pero fundamental: el conocimiento que hay en dicha escoria.

discovering good explanations is hard, but the harder they are to find, the harder they are to vary once found.