Quotes About Understanding

You cannot tell a man's intention by looking at his forehead, you must look through it to the inside of his head; and no judge and jury are capable of looking through the skull of a man who has done nothing but talk to see what goes on inside." And

Christians are not supposed to "just have faith." Christians are commanded to know what they believe and why they believe it. They are commanded to give answers to those who ask (1 Pet. 3:15), and to demolish arguments against the Christian faith (2 Cor. 10:4-5).

A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.

Mark Twain had a point when he concluded that it was not the parts of the Bible he did not understand that bothered him—but the parts he did understand!)

Truth is discovered, not invented. It exists independent of anyone's knowledge of it. (Gravity existed prior to Newton.)

A corollary of this philosophy is that it is not particularly important for a teacher to understand science well. The teacher, after all, is but a coparticipant in the process of constructing "knowledge." (The deemphasis on teacher expertise is probably just as well. As physicist Alan Cromer has pointed out, the training of teachers in constructivist methodology is marvelously suited to creating confusion about the scientific points at issue.)28

When it comes to the ever-elusive goal of achieving what is usually called "scientific literacy" for the general population, it is hard not to conclude that the task is hopeless.7b

The general culture itself, though without strong ideological passions or theoretical enthusiasms, is poor soil for cultivating a widespread understanding of science. It is, to use blunt words, a lazy, fatally unambitious culture, strongly resistant to demands for sustained and coherent thought on any topic (aside, perhaps, from sports, guns, and automobiles).

And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.

Scholars, I plead with you, Where are your dictionaries of the wind, the grasses?

It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.

Slowly we became silent, and silence itself if an enemy to friendship.

At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear. It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us. You can love completely without complete understanding.

So it is that we can seldom help anybody. Either we don't know what part to give or maybe we don't like to give any part of ourselves. Then, more often than not, the part that is needed is not wanted. And even more often, we do not have the part that is needed.

All there is to thinking is seeing something noticeable which makes you see something you weren't noticing which makes you see something that isn't even visible.

When I was young, a teacher had forbidden me to say "more perfect" because she said if a thing is perfect it can't be more so. But by now I had seen enough of life to have regained my confidence in it.

Unless we are willing to escape into sentimentality or fantasy, often the best we can do with catastrophes, even our own, is to find out exactly what happened and restore some of the missing parts.

People move forward into the future out of the way they comprehend the past. When we don't understand something in our past, we are therefore crippled.

You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant.

The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. ... His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one's passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste.

The application of the parable is, I think, that if you do not understand a statement, then to discover that it has no verification is an important piece of information about it and makes you understand it better. That is to say, you understand it better; you do not find out that there

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment [Verhexung] of our intelligence by means of language.

Wittgenstein, if I understand him correctly, has a position much closer to that of psychoanalysis; he limits the task of philosophy to that of recognizing the inevitable insanity of language. "My aim is," he says, "to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense." "He who understands me finally recognizes [my propositions] as senseless." 12

You may use different sorts of sentences and illustrations before different sorts of audiences, but you don't -- if you are wise -- talk down to any audience.