Quotes About Understanding

Almost everyone who opens up a new field does not really understand it the way the followers do." The evidence for this is, unfortunately, all too good. It has been said in physics no creator of any significant thing ever understood what he had done.

From these early attempts to explain things slowly came philosophy as well as our present science. Not that science explains "why" things are as they are - gravitation does not explain why things fall - but science gives so many details of "how" that we have the feeling we understand "why." Let us be clear about this point; it is by the sea of interrelated details that science seems to say "why" the universe is as it is.

We must come down from our heights, and leave our straight paths, for the byways and low places of life, If we would learn truths by strong contrasts; and in hovels, in forecastles, and among our own outcasts in foreign lands, see what has been wrought upon our fellow-creatures by accident, hardship, or strife.

Self understanding helps us connect our own weaknesses to the weaknesses of others and forgive them.

Seeing himself in others, one who is in a state of higher consciousness feels compassion for all beings, and holds only positive thoughts about them.

We need a revolution in academia, with every social science attempting to understand the causes of happiness.

What is ordinary to you may be a desert of woeful newness to another.

Well, my mother said, and she was not exactly smiling, but as though she was wrapping a smile inside a thought.

You know your Bible too well and life too little.

You must learn to tell worry from thought and thought from prayer. Sometimes a light will go from your life, and a thought becomes a prayer til you are strong enough to stand under the weight of your own thought again.

She has passed information to you. Figures names and facts. You have learnt nothing very much. But you have a splendid memory. It will help you when you start to learn.

It hurt to think that a boy would not have him at his value of himself.

Well," my father said to her, and looked at her. "Well," my mother said to him, and looked at him. In that quietness they were speaking their own language, with their eyes, with the way they stood, with what they put into the air about them, each knowing what the other was saying, and having strength one from the other, for they had been learning through forty years of being together, and their minds were one.

Then sense. Use your sense. Not all of us are born for greatness, but all of us have sense. Make use of it. Think. Think long and well.

One of my students told me that every time she learns the name of a plant, she feels as if she is meeting someone new. Giving a name to something is a way of knowing it.

and old Indian saying: 'It's better to know one mountain than to climb many.

In a world of monotonous horror there could be no salvation in wild dreaming. Horror he had adjusted to. But monotony was the greater obstacle, and he realized it now, understood it at long last. And understanding it seemed to give him a sort of quiet peace, a sense of having spread all the cards on his mental table, examined them, and settled conclusively on the desired hand.

Even though they fought, their fighting never turned them against each other. It always ended with them embracing and kissing, smiling, laughing.

I think we're yearning for something beyond the every day. And I will tell you I don't believe in the supernatural, I believe in the supernormal. To me there is nothing that goes against nature. If it seems incomprehensible, it's only because we haven't been able to understand it yet.

There were still many things to learn, but not so many as before.

Anyone who couldn't understand that what's important is a man's soul, not the color of his skin, would never be content here.

Only in some very special cases is comprehension the point of reading--in things like recipes and reading material. The point of reading is understanding, and comprehension is to understanding as getting wet is to swimming. You must do the one before you can hope to do the other, but you don't do the other simply because you do the one.

If you should prefer to understand that children are those human beings who have not yet found the grasp of their own minds, then the task you have given yourself, that task of rearing a child wisely and well, is suddenly transformed from indoctrination to education, in its truest sense, and made not only possible but even likely--provided, to be sure, one little prerequisite, which is that you are not a child, that you have come into the grasp of your own mind.

What should we mean by intelligence? It is not a question of fact, for there is no fact; it is a moral question. There is a shouldness in it.