Quotes About Understanding

People who live in cold climes must keep warm by kindness," Orvo spoke softly in reply. "I think that is how every person should be. Kindness -- it's the same as having a head, a nose, a pair of feet . . . There are many nations living on the earth. Each of their people carries a seed of suspicion toward those not of their own tribe. Oftentimes, they won't even see the people of another tribe as real human beings. . . .

always forgive and be patient.

Nobody is ever misunderstood at a fireside; he may only be disagreed with.

As for international understanding, I feel that macaroni has done more for our appreciation of Italy than Mussolini.

The human mind is a curious thing. It can take just so much and no more.

The total number of people who understand relativistic time, even after eighty years since the advent of special relativity, is still much smaller than the number of people who believe in horoscopes.

In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power.

We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine.

Humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers, or equations, and the simpler the story, the better.

This is the paradox of historical knowledge. Knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless. But knowledge that changes behaviour quickly loses its relevance. The more data we have and the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated.

If you cannot afford to waste time, you will never find the truth.

If you are really in love with someone, you never worry about the meaning of life.

In a world in which everything is interconnected, the supreme moral imperative becomes the imperative to know.

Tolerance is not a Sapiens trademark.

The real test of 'knowledge' is not whether it is true, but whether it empowers us.

As a species, humans prefer power to truth. We spend far more time and effort on trying to control the world than on trying to understand it—and even when we try to understand it, we usually do so in the hope that understanding the world will make it easier to control it.

Religions that lose touch with the technological realities of the day lose their ability even to understand the questions being asked.

1. Science is converging on an all-encompassing dogma, which says that organisms are algorithms, and life is data processing. 2. Intelligence is decoupling from consciousness. 3. Non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms may soon know us better than we know ourselves.

So the best advice I could give a fifteen-year-old stuck in an outdated school somewhere in Mexico, India or Alabama is: don't rely on the adults too much. Most of them mean well, but they just don't understand the world.

the last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information. They already have far too much of it. Instead, people need the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant, and above all to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world.

Vaunted "human intuition" is in reality "pattern recognition.

what people might really need are the tools to connect to their own experiences.

if some issue seems exceptionally important to you, make the effort to read the relevant scientific literature.

The world is becoming ever more complex, and people fail to realize just how ignorant they are of what's going on.