Quotes About Understanding

Oriental idea: you don't teach until you are asked. You don't force your mission down people's throats.) And so the boy

Der Engländer, der sich im Urwald von Nigeria zum Dinner umkleidet, fühlt, daß diese Handlung einen Sinn hat.

is there not some point of wisdom beyond the conflicts of illusion and truth by which lives can be put back together again? That is a prime question, I would say, of this hour in the bringing up of children.

Woman, in the picture language of mythology, represents the totality of what can be known… (She) is the guide to the sublime acme of sensuous adventure. By deficient eyes she is reduced to inferior states; by the evil eye of ignorance she is spellbound to banality and ugliness. But she is redeemed by the eyes of understanding.

Every step they took, she told him something he'd never known before; and yet it always seemed, the moment she'd said it, as if he had known it all his life.

Significant images render insights beyond speech, beyond the kinds of meaning speech defines. And if they do not speak to you, that is because you are not ready for them, and words will only serve to make you think you have understood, thus cutting you off altogether.

With passion you want to possess. The conversion of passion into compassion is the whole problem of marriage.

person who has had a mystical experience knows that all the symbolic expressions of it are faulty. The symbols don't render the experience, they suggest it. If you haven't had the experience, how can you know what it is? Try to explain the joy of skiing to somebody living in the tropics who has never even seen snow. There has to be an experience to catch the message, some clue—otherwise you're not hearing what is being said. MOYERS:

Gods are metaphors transparent to transcendence. And my understanding of the mythological mode is that deities and even people are to be understood in this sense, as metaphors. It's a poetic understanding. It is to be understood in the same sense as Goethe's words at the end of Faust: "Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis" ("Everything transitory is but a reference").

Eternity isn't some later time. Eternity isn't some long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension between here and now, where thinking and time cuts out. If you won't get it here, you won't get it anywhere. The experience of eternity is right here and now is the function of life.

The boy answers, Don't ask unless you are willing to be hurt. Indra says, I ask. Teach. (That, by the way, is a good Oriental idea: you don't teach until you are asked. You don't force your mission down people's throats.)

Eternity isn't some later time. Eternity isn't some long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension between here and now, where thinking and time cuts out. If you won't get it here, you won't get it anywhere. The experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life

The word compassion means literally suffering with. Of course compassion condones suffering in that it recognizes yes, suffering is life.

Mythology is not invented rationally; mythology cannot be rationally understood.

Tienes que distinguir entre razón y pensamiento. Pensar como puedes echar abajo la pared no es razonar (...) La razón tiene que ver con hallar el fundamento del ser y la estructuración fundamental del orden del universo.

Mythology opens the world so that it becomes transparent to something that is beyond speech, beyond words—in short, what we call transcendence. Without that you don't have a mythology. Any system of thinking, ideologies of one kind or another, that does not open to transcendence cannot be classified or understood mythologically.

Forgiveness is the key to happiness.

Some people talk to animals. Not many listen though. That's the problem.

I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and long words Bother me.

You can't help respecting anybody who can spell TUESDAY, even if he doesn't spell it right; but spelling isn't everything. There are days when spelling Tuesday simply doesn't count.

Oh, Eeyore, you are wet!" said Piglet, feeling him. Eeyore shook himself, and asked somebody to explain to Piglet what happened when you had been inside a river for quite a long time.

Hallo, Eeyore." "Same to you, Pooh Bear, and twice on Thursdays," said Eeyore gloomily. Before Pooh could say: 'Why Thursdays?' Christopher Robin began to explain the sad story of Eeyore's lost house.

Well, you can't know it without something having been sneezed.

You know, when once you've discovered a secret yourself, it always seems as if it must be so obvious to everybody else.