Quotes About Understanding

Economics [...] has the advantage of joining an extremely simple model of human nature with extremely complicated mathematical formulae that non-specialists can rarely understand, much less criticize.

Dionysius warns us that we cannot begin to understand how symbols work until we rid ourselves of the notion that divine things are likely to be beautiful.

For every subtle and complicated question, there is a perfectly simple and straightforward answer, which is wrong. — H. L. Mencken (slightly rephrased)

In short, [Native Americans] say, the name of savages, which we bestow upon them, would fit ourselves better, since there is nothing in our actions that bears an appearance of wisdom.

How vain the opinion is of some certain people of the East Indies, who think that apes and baboons, which are with them in great numbers, are imbued with understanding, and that they can speak but will not, for fear they should be imployed and set to work. —Antoine Le Grand, c. 1675

Moral envy is an undertheorized phenomenon.

One must simplify the world to discover something new about it. The problem comes when, long after the discovery has been made, people continue to simplify.

Friendship is neither a formality nor a mode it is rather a life.

Take it from me, the best way to be appreciated somewhere is to not be there, you get me?

How could she be feeling the very same streams that rushed around within him? She thought, as they overflowed and lapped inside her too. She had never felt the inside of another person this way.

She had not known how to tell him that his loving whispers were always in her ears, like a story she'd been told, the story of a thing she did not deserve. But he understood. He called those thoughts "the baby teeth of a snake," and swore he would rip them out of her, and pledged to prove to her that the opposite was true. And he didn't even have to explain to her what he meant by "the opposite"; she knew it was the opposite of her.

The body is so beautiful, she says with newly found wonder she senses. So good and so precious. Sweet, this body of ours is sweet. It gives us so much goodness and happiness if we're only good to it, if we only listen to it, because it is so wise. It always knows what we want before we know ourselves, and it knows what's really good for us. If we only understand what it's trying to tell us, our precious body, if we only love it as it is, exactly as it is...

Dove sei? Come curi questo mal di cuore? So che soffri quanto me. Forse persino più di me, perchè in questo momento ti siamo entrambi contro.

Ripeto la parola "dolore" come fa Yochai con le parole che non capisce. Hai detto che in questo modo cerca di tenere lontano le cose che non conosce. Dolore dolore dolore.

Con le lacrime agli occhi, quel giorno mi hai chiesto che orologio avessi e io ho riso, dicendo che non era un particolare importante. Al che, immediatamente, hai risposto: "Tutto è importante, come fai a non capire che tutto quello che racconti è importante e prezioso per me? Tutti i tuoi particolari.

Do you know when childhood ends?" my father once asked me after one of my rants about Nina. "Do you know when people really start to mature? When they can accept that their parents have a right to their own psychology.

Vorrei che tu potessi ricordare come ci si sente quando si è donna, e come ci si sente quando non si è né uomo né donna. Solo "essere", prima di tutto, prima delle definizioni, dei pronomi personali, delle parole e dei generi. Forse, in questo modo, potresti anche arrivare, quasi per caso, alla possibilità primordiale di essere me

Sono saggio soprattutto riguardo alle cose che non so

One of the greatest skills any leader can master is becoming comfortable with silence.

The primary urge that motivates and engenders writing...is the writer's desire to invent and tell a story, and to know himself. But the more I write, the more I feel the force of the other urge, which collaborates with and completes the first one: the desire to know the Other from within him. To feel what it means to be another person. To be able to touch, if only for a moment, the blaze that burns within another human being.

Tamar noticed that she had never met a person she felt so comfortable being silent with.

I like to do things that frighten me. When I'm afraid, I understand more things. I want the feeling... All my instincts cry out against it, every morning anew. Then I say, 'I should do it. If I don't do it, no one will do it for me.

The strange thing was, he wanted to like everyone. He just couldn't find a way to do it.

1992) Wen-tzu: Understanding the Mysteries. Trans. T. Cleary. Boston: Shambhala.