Quotes About Understanding

Before you're ready to tell that story well, you might have to study and learn the equivalent of an entire specialized college education on the society in which your story takes place, because all sorts of things were happening that you need to understand before you can even begin to tell a story in that milieu.

The doctrine of original sin is the doctrine according to which divine forgiveness makes known the accidental nature of human mortality, thus permitting an entirely new anthropological understanding.

Whenever you interpret anything, you can read it two ways: in such a way that your interpretation creates mercy, and in such a way that it creates sacrifice.

The selfishness must be discovered and understood before it can be removed. It is powerless to remove itself, neither will it pass away of itself. Darkness ceases only when light is introduced; so ignorance can only be dispersed by Knowledge; selfishness by Love.

Only as men succeed in seeing no evil in others will they become free from sin, and sorrow, and suffering.

A man's sympathy extends just so far as his wisdom reaches, and no further; and a man only grows wiser as he grows tenderer and more compassionate. To narrow one's sympathy is to narrow one's heart, and so to darken and embitter one's life.

To sympathise with another is to receive his being into our own, to become one with him, for unselfish love indissolubly unites, and he whose sympathy reaches out to and embraces all humankind and all living creatures has realised his identity and oneness with all, and comprehends the universal Love and Law and Wisdom.

The curtailing of one's desires is the beginning of wisdom; their entire mastery its consumption.

Good thoughts and actions can never produce bad results; bad thoughts and actions can never produce good results … We understand this law in the natural world, and work with it; but few understand it in the mental and moral world—although its operation there is just as simple and undeviating— and they, therefore, do not cooperate with it.

If we truly want to learn, we never learn when we are talking. We only learn when we are listening.

Grow antennae, not horns.

Gauge thy life wisely but gauge thy neighbors' wiser!

Thou should not judge harshly, because thou too will be so judged by the same measure

The doctor may also learn more about the illness from the way the patient tells the story than from the story itself.

To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.

What can be shown, cannot be said.

Thoughts pass from one individual to another, each time a little transformed, for each individual can attach to them somewhat different associations. Strictly speaking, the receiver never understands the thought exactly in the way that the transmitter intended it to be understood. After a series of such encounters, practically nothing is left of the original content. Whose thought is it that continues to circulate?

The current state of knowledge remains vague when history is not considered, just as history remains vague without substantive knowledge about the current state.

The more one is truly human, the more one is able to trust, because one understands the reasons for believing in another.

l'unica cosa su cui sarai giudicata è se l'hai chiesto.

Libertà è accettare

Il cuore dell'uomo, autocoscienza del tutto

Leggere rendendosi conto

3. La vera educazione deve essere un'educazione alla critica.