Quotes About Understanding

it is not always that we want friends to be so reasonable and rational about things. Sometimes we want people we like to agree with us, to say yes, you have been hard done by, regardless.

[To Dr. Johnson:] If you were to make little fishes talk, they would talk like whales.

We are not to judge of the feelings of others by what we might feel if in their place. However dark the habitation of the mole to our eyes, yet the animal itself finds the apartment sufficiently lightsome.

Offences are easily pardoned where there is love at the bottom.

Both wit and understanding are trifles, without integrity; it is that which gives value to every character. The ignorant peasant without fault is greater than the philosopher with many; for what is genius or courage without an heart?

Maybe we'll evolve to a point where fear as an experience is no longer instinctual, but rather an emotion we use to enrich our understanding of why our human ancestors killed each other when they could have loved each other. One day we'll be holding hands instead of grudges; we'll eliminate our territorial circuits and know what love is. One day we'll be holding hands instead of M-16s.

Neurosis is the rule, not the exception', and grasping this can help us to see that we are not alone. It is also the starting point for understanding what went wrong and learning that we have a choice: we can simply re-enact the past, or we can rewrite the script.

Don't ask questions. 2. Learn from them as the experts on their disability. 3. Always agree with everything they say, never interrupting them.

There are only three words you need to live by, son: respect, consideration and tolerance.

The fine art is about asking questions and how we understand our world and our place in it.

Awe and respect are two different things.

Language, that most human invention, can enable what, in principle, should not be possible. It can allow all of us, even the congenitally blind, to see with another person's eyes.

Americans, like people everywhere, are in thrall to their visions of the past, rarely realizing the extent to which their understanding of history shapes behavior in the here and now. Historical understanding defines people's very sense of what is thinkable and achievable. As a result, many have lost the ability to imagine a world that is substantially different from and better than what exists today.

It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.

Beware how you take away hope from another human being.

Controversy equalizes fools and wise men - and the fools know it.

The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live.

Truth, when not sought after, rarely comes to light.

A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.

Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.

No stranger can get a great many notes of torture out of a human soul it takes one that knows it well -- parent, child, brother, sister, intimate.

The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract.

To be master of any branch of knowledge, you must master those which lie next to it; and thus to know anything you must know all.

Upon this point a page of history is worth a volume of logic.