Quotes About Understanding

Along the way, each marveled at how easy it was to get an incomplete picture of the world if one relied solely on experts, and how important it would be to further rely on oneself.

listening means learning to hear someone's inner world and deepest feelings with far greater attention in order that we don't let our own assumptions get in the way. The dying may speak in images far more akin to dreamland than the world of everyday reality. In order to understand them we have to make adjustments to comprehend a poetic form of expression that is sometimes elusive but actually far more expressive than the world of facts.

One balks, then agrees, then balks again only to agree again; that is the way one learns things.

As she watched him, Mrs. Gates was once again struck by the painful realization that there were Ã¢â'¬Â¦ things Ã¢â'¬Â¦ about her husband she would never understand. Gaps in his life she could never fill, leaps in his thinking she could not comprehend.

And I know now it will happen over and over again until it stops for you. You hear words, you see images, and fragments of things come back to you that you can't understand, but because they're there you condemn yourself. You always will condemn yourself until someone proves to you that whatever you were Ã¢â'¬Â¦ there are others using you, who will sacrifice you. But there's also someone else out there who wants to help you, help us. That's the message!

But it's better to know a lot and say little, I think, than know a little and say a lot.

Core to leadership is the ability to relate to people—to empathize, understand, inspire, and motivate.

He taught me early in life to take people one at a time, based on their individual qualities and never as a member of a group. That led, he said, to hatred and bias; that was what the Nazis had done.

We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly.

The more you read, the more you calm down.

If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then it might be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas

The way to see what looks good and understand the reasons it looks good, and to be at one with this goodness as the work proceeds, is to cultivate an inner quietness, a peace of mind so that goodness can shine through.

First you get the feeling, then you figure out why.

To define something is to subordinate it to a tangle of intellectual relationships. And when you do that you destroy real understanding.

If you can't define something you have no formal rational way of knowing that it exists. Neither can you really tell anyone else what it is. There is, in fact, no formal difference between inability to define and stupidity.

If Quality were dropped, only rationality would remain unchanged.

Science grows by its mu answers more than by its yes or no answers.

Definitions are the foundation of reason. You can't reason without them.

To reach him you have to back up and back up, and the further back you go, the further back you see you have to go, until what looked like a small problem of communication turns into a major philosophic inquiry.

A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance.

The best students always are flunking. Every good teacher knows that.

May, will you please, kindly DIG it, he remembered one of them saying, and hold up on all those wonderful seven-dollar questions? If you got to ask what IS it all the time, you'll never get time to KNOW.

The solutions all are simple—after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are.