Quotes About Understanding

Whenever we try to improve things and fail, it is not because the spiteful (or unfathomably benevolent) gods are thwarting us or punishing us for trying, or because we have reached a limit on the capacity of reason to make improvements, or because it is best that we fail, but always because we did not know enough, in time.

there can be only one type of person: universal explainers and constructors.

inventing falsehoods is easy, and therefore they are easy to vary once found; discovering good explanations is hard, but the harder they are to find, the harder they are to vary once found.

There is an explanatory link between ought and is, and this provides one of the ways in which reason can indeed address moral issues.

Since theories can contradict each other, but there are no contradictions in reality, every problem signals that our knowledge must be flawed or inadequate.

Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, that when we grasp it – in a decade, a century, or a millennium – we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise?

Good/bad explanation An explanation that is hard/easy to vary while still accounting for what it purports to account for.

They can be understood only by being explained. Fortunately, our best theories embody deep explanations as well as accurate predictions.

A theory may be superseded by a new theory which explains more, and is more accurate, but is also easier to understand, in which case the old theory becomes redundant, and we gain more understanding while needing to learn less than before. That is what happened when Nicolaus Copernicus's theory of the Earth travelling round the Sun superseded the complex Ptolemaic system which had placed the Earth at the centre of the universe.

We understand the fabric of reality only by understanding theories that explain it. And since they explain more than we are immediately aware of, we can understand more than we are immediately aware that we understand.

This is the cosmic significance of explanatory knowledge – and hence of people, whom I shall henceforward define as entities that can create explanatory knowledge.

Richard Feynman said, 'Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.

The purpose of high-level sciences is to enable us to understand emergent phenomena, of which the most important are, as we shall see, life, thought and computation.

And maybe one day people will accept each other for who they are and not which race they're born to," I said. He gave me the classic Walter look, the one that says, "You may be the adult, but who do you think you're kidding?

The key is to get to know people and trust them to be who they are. Instead, we trust people to be who we want them to be - and when they're not, we cry.

Fame does lead to money, which I don't have a close relationship with. I'm the kind of guy who never sees the money - it all goes somewhere else. I don't understand it, I don't like to deal with it. I have a fear of not having it, because I grew up without it.

One of the scary things is that, when you're a kid, you look at your dad as the man who has no fear. When you're an adult, you realize your father had fear, and that you have it, too.

You perceive and remember that to which you can relate. When you observe something aberrant, your tendency is to build a metaphor to explain what you didn't understand.

Every week I get letters from people worldwide who feel that the possibilian point of view represents their understanding better than either religion or neo-atheism.

You and me, we were married and we lived in that small dark space between two people where marriage exists.

Einar felt lonely, and he wondered if anybody in the world would ever know him.

Faith, I tell them, is a mystery, elusive to many, and never easy to explain.

Isn't it easier to forgive than to hate? -Eriond

you will marvel at how very unusual Yale's team of star performers is in combining rigor and objectivity with the personal warmth and trust that avoids "politics" or "positioning" and maximizes real listening for full understanding every day.