Quotes About Understanding

Defects and weakness in men's understandings, as well as other faculties, come from want of a right use of their own minds; I am apt to think, the fault is generally mislaid upon nature, and there is often a complaint of want of parts, when the fault lies in want of a due improvement of them.

The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it.

He that uses his words loosely and unsteadily will either not be minded or not understood.

The necessity of believing without knowledge, nay often upon very slight grounds, in this fleeting state of action and blindness we are in, should make us more busy and careful to inform ourselves than constrain others.

To prejudge other men's notions before we have looked into them is not to show their darkness but to put out our own eyes.

The understanding, like the eye, whilst it makes us see and perceive all other things, takes no notice of itself: and it requires art and pains to set it at a distance and make it its own object.

Knowledge is grateful to the understanding, as light to the eyes.

Hunting after arguments to make good one side of a question, and wholly to neglect and refuse those which favor the other side ... [is] willfully to misguide the understanding; and is so far from giving truth its due value, it wholly debases it.

For those who either perceive but dully, or retain the ideas that come into their minds but ill, who cannot readily excite or compound them, will have little matter to think on.

The old know what they want the young are sad and bewildered.

It's an odd thing about this universe that, though we all disagree with each other, we are all of us always in the right.

Don't tell your friends their social faults they will cure the fault and never forgive you.

And thanks to Christina McMullen, who has taught me that common sense and intelligence need not have any correlation whatsoever.

Let us talk about oxymoron, common sense, for instance.

You really don't know a person until you spend some time in their panties.

Friends are nice. You can tell' 'em stuff, but you can swear like a gangster at an enemy. And that's all right, too.

A pigs and pain, until you really get to know 'em. Then he's a paid with the soul.

Friends disregard your failures and endure your successes.

Sometimes what really damages us is not so much the controversy but the impression that we don't really understand others' objections.

I feel sorry for anyone who is in a place where he feels strange and stupid.

Of course they needed to care. It was the meaning of everything.

Even trained for years as they all had been in precision of language, what words could you use which would give another the experience of sunshine?

He knew that there was no quick comfort for emotions like those. They were deeper and they did not need to be told. They were felt.

I'm sorry. I can love you. I can grieve for you, or with you. I can share your pain. But I cannot judge you.