Quotes About Understanding

in every created thing, whether it is alive or whether is what we usually call inanimate, there is an attempt to communicate, even among the totally silent. There is a question being asked, a different question for every entity, which for the most part will never be put into words, even by those who can speak.

Fui capaz de descubrir lo que estaba oculto en la oscuridad

like most people, they know one another inside out, and not at all.

Reading fiction, I see through the prism of another person's understanding; reading everything else, I am travelling--I am travelling in the way that I still can: new sights, new experiences. I am reminded sometimes of the intensity of childhood reading, that absolute absorption when the very ability to read was a heady new gain, the gateway to a different place, to a parallel universe you hadn't known was there. The one entirely benign mind-altering drug.

I've been like someone with a bad cold, all kind of shut up inside myself, not being able to hear other people. Just shouting out at them sometimes.

Helen,' said Mr Harrison, with a sigh, 'we all know that living with James can be very trying. But it does help to develop a resistance to some of his more flagrant lines of deception.

Silence is full of speech.

Don't wear yourself out Dad. Is that your way of telling your old man to shut up?

much more focus on risk management, rather than risk measurement. Understanding how to reduce risk before the fact is much more productive than identifying it afterward.

How do you know it's true if you don't believe in it? I...huh? How can you understand something you don't believe in? Shin, that doesn't make any sense. That's like saying you can't understand leprechauns unless you believe in them. Do you understand leprechauns? I don't believe in them. There you go.

There is a camaraderie that grows up among those who work with old books and old papers, largely, I suspect, because we understand that we are at odds with the rest of the world: we are travelling backwards, while all those around us are still moving forward.

Some drink to forget, I drink to remember. I drink in order to understand what I mean and to discover what I know. Under its benign influence all the stories and dramas which properly belong to the sphere of art are announced by me in conversation.

Those who hasten to be wise (...) have some times lost their own Wits.

the Gulphe in which truth lies is bottomless and it will wash over whatever is thrown into it.

You ask about the effects of my work on others. If I may wax ironical, that is a masculine questions. Men always want to be terribly influential, but I see that as somewhat external. Do I imagine myself being influential? No. I want to understand. And if others understand - in the same sense that I have understood - that gives me a sense of satisfaction, like feeling at home.

Nothing can guarantee that the community will not become a monster—especially if it does not put its own presuppositions at risk and listen to the other

I knew I had been lonely, Mem, yet I had no understanding of my desolation until my skin was finally touched.

The brain is a funny thing, the way it works, always looking for the most polite explanation...

The knowledge that we consider knowledge proves itself in action. What we now mean by knowledge is information in action, information focused on results.

Of all the important pieces of self-knowledge, understanding how you learn is the easiest to acquire.

Mutual understanding can never be attained by "communications down," can never be created by talking. It can result only from "communications up." It requires both the superior's willingness to listen and a tool especially designed to make lower managers heard.

Gentlemen, I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here." Everyone around the table nodded assent. "Then," continued Mr. Sloan, "I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.

The first secret of effectiveness is to understand the people you work with and depend on so that you can make use of their strengths, their ways of working, and their values. Working relationships are as much based on the people as they are on the work.

To make knowledge productive, we will have to learn to see both forest and tree. We will have to learn to connect.