Quotes About Understanding

Beware of anyone who tells you a topic is above you or better left to experts. Many people are twice as smart as they think they are but they've been intimidated into believing some topics are above them. You can understand almost anything if it is explained well. " ~ "World War I - The Rest of the Story and How it Affects You Today

Some years ago I read a book that brought Einstein's theory of relativity down to an eighth grade level. This convinced me that any subject can be made easy. In other words, always beware of anyone who tells you a topic is above you or better left to experts. This person may, for some reason, be trying to shut you out. You CAN understand almost anything.

Geometric diagrams are to geometers what board and pieces are to chessmasters: visual aids, helpful but not indispensable.

The thing is to sift out the important sounds, little syllables and vowels that bring hints of their lost words, and not to mistake the fossil for the life, or the kiss for the love, not to mistake the fragment for the sentence.

Sometimes it seems that all our words, even those for love, are written in another language. And yet they still arrive, distant, full of their own silences which may be what allows us to invent another story, what saves us. What is the word for the kind of love the woman shows now? A word that contains the whole story the way her lamp contains her room, — Richard Jackson, from "The Whole Story," Resonance: Poems (The Ashland Poetry Press, 2010)

How seldom we can see our way to say what we love. — Richard Jackson, from "Elegy Along a Line of Sight," The Heart as Framed: New and Select Poems (Press 53, 2022)

On principle, we should be suspicious of explanations for other people's beliefs and behaviors when those explanations imply they would believe and behave as we do, if only the were as mature and enlightened as we are

Thanks for treating me like, you know, a person through all this shit. I know that isn't always easy. (Stark) You do have a habit of pissing on other people's welcome mats. But, when a gentleman gives you a booty call to a massacre, it's easy to forgive. Ciao. (Candy)

A gun is like love. The universal language.

You don't have to be afraid of me. Eugene likes you. Doc likes you. That means I like you. We're all family now. All the funny little people who live in the cracks of the world.

Hell, boy. At some point, all fathers want to kill their sons. Just like all sons think about killing their old man. They're too much alike or they're not enough alike. It doesn't matter. What's beautiful is that they don't do it.

I close my eyes. "I keep coming back to this one thought: that I know everything about monsters and nothing about people.

I don't seem to be alone anymore." "Very well," says Vehuel. "We'd like—" "Shh," he says, holding up a hand. "I'm trying to count." "Of course," Vehuel says in a tone that makes it pretty obvious she's not used to getting shushed.

When she was six, someone had explained to her that the grooves on the LPs were really little hills and valleys and that the needles made music from bouncing through them. One day when she learned that her fingerprints were little hills and valleys, she got a sewing needle and dragged it across her fingers. All it did was draw blood. Lesson learned. People weren't records. Records were.

We must always look after our friends, even when they are foolish. Especially when they are foolish.

Being able to embrace contradictions is a sign of intelligence. Or insanity.

If we possess narrative sympathy - enabling us to see the world from other's point of view - we cannot kill. If we do not, we cannot love.

To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day. Lao-Tzu

All children wear a sign that says, 'I want to be important NOW!' Many of our problems with today's youth arise because nobody reads the sign." —REVEREND JESSE JACKSON

A wholesome oblivion of one's neighbours is the beginning of wisdom.

For ever has it been that Faith and Love allow us to see clearly what we cannot see by eyes alone.

For ever has it been that Faith and Love allow us to see what we cannot see with eyes alone.

When the wrong question is being asked, it usually turns out to be because the right question is too difficult. Scientists ask questions they can answer. That is, it is often the case that the operations of a science are not a consequence of the problematic of that science, but that the problematic is induced by the available means.

I believe if there's any kind of God it wouldn't be in any of us, not you or me but just this little space in between. If there's any kind of magic in this world it must be in the attempt of understanding someone sharing something. I know, it's almost impossible to succeed but who cares really? The answer must be in the attempt.