Quotes About Understanding

If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.

It is the obvious which is so difficult to see most of the time. People say 'It's as plain as the nose on your face.' But how much of the nose on your face can you see, unless someone holds a mirror up to you?

To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

A pig won't meet another pig halfway, but a man will meet a man.

What did our dear Joseph manage to see in life? Bupkis is what.

Grammar school never taught me anything about grammar.

The man who wants to make me change my religion surely does so only because he would not change his, even if forced: he thinks it strange, then, that I do not do something he would not do himself perhaps for the whole world." Montesquieu

At the start of every conversation ask yourself what can I give, not what can I take.

There is as much to be learned from a man with little, as there is from a man with much.

If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient attention, than to any other talent.

Nature is pleased with simplicity. And nature is no dummy

Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy.

To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. Tis much better to do a little with certainty & leave the rest for others that come after than to explain all things by conjecture without making sure of any thing.

I have studied these things - you have not.

Les hommes construisent trop de murs et pas assez de ponts.

Truth is the offspring of silence and meditation. I keep the subject constantly before me and wait 'til the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light.

God who gave Animals self motion beyond our understanding is without doubt able to implant other principles of motion in bodies [which] we may understand as little. Some would readily grant this may be a Spiritual one; yet a mechanical one might be showne, did not I think it better to pass it by.

A Vulgar Mechanick can practice what he has been taught or seen done, but if he is in an error he knows not how to find it out and correct it, and if you put him out of his road he is at a stand. Whereas he that is able to reason nimbly and judiciously about figure, force, and motion, is never at rest till he gets over every rub. (from a letter dated 25 May, 1694)

A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.

As a blind man has no idea of colors, so have we no idea of the manner by which the all-wise God perceives and understands all things

Amicus Plato amicus Aristoteles magis amica veritas.

To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. 'Tis much better to do a little with certainty, & leave the rest for others that come after you, than to explain all things by conjecture without making sure of any thing.