Quotes About Understanding

Do you ask 'Nu' of? Or do you ask, transitively? 'Nu?' he asked. And is it even a question in the accepted sense? 'Nu,' he said. Would that have been better? Nu, meaning how are things with you, but also I know how things are with you.

But what is the imagination for if not tto grasp how the world feels to those who don't think what you think?

to bar communication between intellectuals, who are always our best hope of peace, is particularly self-defeating and inane. It declares, inter alia, that we have a) made up our minds about what we think, b) closed our minds to what others think, and c) chosen to go on hearing nothing with which we happen to disagree.

But you don't always have to ask to know.

If so, then we must conclude that scientists do not understand the meaning of their own theories and must wait for historians like Kuhn to enlighten them! Such a claim appears arrogant, to say the least, and imposes a burden of proof on Kuhn and other defenders of incommensurability that they have not met. So,

Steven Toulmin's very insightful analysis and critique of Kuhn is found in his outstanding analysis of conceptual change Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evaluation of Human Concepts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972

The human understanding, once it has adopted opinions, either because they were already accepted or believed, or because it likes them, draws everything else to support and agree with them. And though it may meet a greater number and weight of contrary instances, it will, with great and harmful prejudice, ignore or condemn or exclude them by introducing some distinction, in order that those earlier assumptions may remain intact and unharmed

the world becomes a better place – an easier place to navigate if we admit that even though there are opinions, they may be wrong.

We have no way of knowing what words you are going to misuse, so we cannot offer you a list. What we can offer, though, is a test that you yourself can apply to any word, whenever you are in doubt. A Test: Do I Know This Word? Ask yourself: 'Do I know this word?' If the answer is no, then you do not know it.

The world is full of mostly invisible things,And there is no way but putting the mind's eye,Or its nose, in a book, to find them out,Things like the square root of EverestOr how many times Byron goes into Texas,Or whether the law of the excluded middleApplies west of the Rockies.

Friendship is provisional, you have to keep earning it, back and forth, give the gift that's only each other's to give

My mother and Alexis had said no more than ten words to each other. The long silences were deafening

Empathy and emotions do not equate to knowledge or true understanding about others' circumstances.

Therapy opened me up and enabled me to appreciate how fulfilling it was to be truly heard. That led me to the thought: "You know, somebody else might actually have something to say. Let's just sit here and listen and not make it all about you.

The religious mysteries direct us toward the true nature of reality that we are unaware of. Religion opens our mind and spirit to the greater reality. Much of what we call supernatural is only what we don't understand.

Why doesn't God do something so spectacular that we would know what we are supposed to do?

What separates us from God is our own sense of separateness.

In the face of these alternatives Jesus came forth with still another. On this point Simkhovitch makes a profound contribution to the understanding of the psychology of Jesus. He reminds us that Jesus expressed his alternative in a "brief formula—The Kingdom of Heaven is in us.

The conventional Christian word is muffled, confused, and vague.

It is a grievous blunder to assume that understanding is always sympathetic. Very often we use the phrase "I understand" to mean something kindly, warm, and gracious. But there is an understanding that is hard, cold, minute, and deadly. It is the kind of understanding that one gives to the enemy, or that is derived from an accurate knowledge of another's power to injure. There is an

Unless one actually lives day by day without a sense of security, he cannot understand what worlds separated Jesus from Paul at this point. The striking similarity between the social position of Jesus in Palestine and that of the vast majority of American Negroes is obvious to anyone who tarries long over the facts.

It is very easy to sit in judgment upon the behavior of others but often difficult to realize that every judgment is a self-judgment.

Being happily and successfully married is generally not so much a matter of marrying the right person as it is being the right person.

Theological analysis: The investigative side of theology that seeks to sort out and evaluate the understanding of faith implicit or explicit in any given statement or action. Theological construction: The synthetic (integrative) side of theology that seeks to fashion a fresh exposition of the meaning of faith in the Christian message.