Quotes About Understanding

Every biblical story reflects something that mattered to its author. Whenever we figure out what it was and why it mattered, we move a step closer to knowing who wrote a part of the Bible.

The arts are weapons of understanding and weapons of happiness.

Resolution, like responsibility, is a product of ownership, and kids can't resolve a conflict until they figure out how they contributed to it.

Much of the church rapidly lost the Reformers' consciousness of the noetic effects of sin, the impact of fallen human nature in darkening the unregenerate mind. Later theologians readily forgot that sin generates an unconscious drive to construct systems of understanding the world which suppress the knowledge of the real God, systems which deform and distort the facts and theories they incorporate.

If you can figure out why your child is sleeping poorly and make the necessary changes, he should be sleeping well much sooner—usually within a few days, two weeks at the most.

Philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong.

What I cannot create, I do not understand.

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

There are words and words and none mean anything. And then one sentence means everything.

We remember nothing. Maybe for a year or two. Maybe most of a life, if we live. Maybe. But then we will die, and who will ever understand any of this? And maybe we remember nothing most of all when we put our hands on our hearts and carry on about not forgetting.

Then, what's the matter?' I wonder, in fact, how many times I have said that or something equal to it to a woman passing palely through my life. What're you thinking? What's made you so quiet? You seem suddenly different. What's the matter? Love me is what this means, of course. Or at least, second best: surrender. Or at the very least, take some time regaling me with why you won't, and maybe by the end you will.

Humans generally get out the gist of what they need to say right at the beginning, then spend forever qualifying, contradicting, burnishing or taking important things back. Yor rareley miss anything by cutting most people off after two sentences.

At the exact moment any decision seems to be being made, it's usually long after the real decision was actually made--like light we see emitted from stars.

There has been a revolution in our understanding over the last forty years, and the gains in knowledge are permanent. But we will never know everything, and that is as it should be. From the obscuring mist of the past, science has ensured that some of the mountains have emerged into clear view, but as soon as that happens the misty shadows of further peaks are glimpsed in the distance, rank upon rank: so many other heights to climb, so many mysteries to investigate.

Don't let the workings of adversity totally absorb your life. Try to understand what you can. Act where you are able; then let the matter rest with the Lord for a period while you give to others in worthy ways before you take on appropriate concern again.

When scriptures are used as the Lord has caused them to be recorded, they have intrinsic power that is not communicated when paraphrased.

Upward growth occurs in cycles that build upon each other in an ascending spiral of capacity and understanding. They are often not easy, but they are always beneficial. As you walk the path of righteousness, you will grow in strength, understanding, and self­esteem. You will discover hidden talents and unknown capacities. The whole course of your life may be altered for your happiness and the Lord's purposes.

It's not just Mississippi. The North is segregated too. This is work the whole country needs to do. White people need to understand the bitterness we feel about slavery. There's pride that we survived the whole experience and came through it with dignity, and then successfully fought for our civil rights, but a lot of white people act like it's no big deal, or we should be grateful for what we have now. They haven't even begun to understand.

Despite leading a 'disordered' life, Greene had a surprising effect on Catholics. Hovering on the edges of the church, his old friend Edith Sitwell, who converted some years later, wrote to him in 1945: 'I said before, but I repeat it, what a great priest you would have made. But you are better as you are.'12 She felt that he understood sin and redemption in a way the clergy did not.

That does not mean something is wrong with us as humans, but it does mean that our understanding of human behavior can be improved by appreciating how people systematically go wrong.

Doctors are crucial choice architects, and with an understanding of how Humans think, they could do far more to improve people's health and thus to lengthen their lives.

Learning is most likely if people get immediate, clear feedback after each try.

It is particularly hard for people to make good decisions when they have trouble translating the choices they face into the experiences they will have.

Just as there are odors that dogs can smell and we cannot, as well as sounds that dogs can hear and we cannot, so too there are wavelengths of light we cannot see and flavors we cannot taste. Why then, given our brains wired the way they are, does the remark "Perhaps there are thoughts we cannot think," surprise you? Evolution, so far, may possibly have blocked us from being able to think in some directions; there could be unthinkable thoughts.