Quotes About Understanding

If one reads too quickly or too slowly, one understands nothing.

Prior to any generalization about literature, literary texts have to be read, and the possibility of reading can never be taken for granted. It is an act of understanding that can never be observed, nor in any way prescribed or verified.

And to read is to understand, to question, to know, to forget, to erase, to deface, to repeat--that is to say, the endless prosopopoeia by which the dead are made to have a face and a voice which tells the allegory of their demise and allows us to apostrophize them in our turn. No degree of knowledge can ever stop this madness, for it is the madness of words.

No one in his right mind will try to grow grapes by the luminosity of the word "day.

I don't have any ill will toward anybody, except for maybe the people...yeah, the people.

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.

Mathematics is only a tool and one should learn to hold the physical ideas in one's mind without reference to the mathematical form.

You are good at making sense of most life events in ways that enable you to move on.

Emotions change how we see the world and how we interpret the actions of others. We do not seek to challenge why we are feeling a particular emotion; instead, we seek to confirm it.

Reason is the shepherd trying to corral life's vast flock of wild irrationalities.

Wisdom is knowing when you can't be wise.

God" must be an experience before "God" can be a word. Unless God is an experience, whatever words we might use for the Divine will be without content, like road signs pointing nowhere, like lightbulbs without electricity. Buddha would warn Christians, and I believe Rahner would second the warning: if you want to use words for God, make sure that these words are preceded by, or at least coming out of, an experience that is your own.

St. Thomas Aquinas said it neatly and powerfully centuries ago: "Things known are in the knower according to the mode of the knower.

any Christian theologian who proposes a theology of religions but who doesn't know much about any other religion than her/his own should be regarded as highly suspicious, if not dangerous.

If Christians, in other words, only talk and never listen, they're not very good Christians.

My truth" becomes opposed to, or destructive of, "your truth." To return to the image I already used: when we take the tropical bird of religious language and put it in a cage, it becomes a bird of prey.

And this power in their teaching had to do, first of all, with the content of what they taught – that is, with the way "what they said" made clear "what really is.

the religions of the world have to come together, not to form a new, singular religion but to form a dialogical community of communities.

Father Hugo M. Enomiya-Lassalle, a German Jesuit who spent most of his life in Japan and became a Zen teacher, said somewhere that the precondition for addressing God as a "you" is the realization that we shouldn't.

Hans Küng's sobering words: "No peace among nations without peace among religions. And no peace among religions without a greater dialogue among them.

In real interreligious dialogue, heart speaks to heart. Only so can persons from differing traditions really "hear" each other.

Translation: the primary purpose of all the language in the Bible and in the creeds and catechism is to tell us how to live rather than provide us with clear, final answers about the nature of God and the universe.

Only with the peace that comes with such mindfulness will we be able to respond in a way that brings forth peace for the event or person or feeling we are dealing with.

When our opposition to those we have judged to be the oppressors is so animated by wisdom and compassion, our opposition to what they are doing will always contain an option for their wellbeing. So a preferential option for the poor is also always part of an option for the oppressors. We are also seeking to promote the wellbeing of the oppressors, their happiness, their peace.