Quotes About Understanding

Squareness may be succinctly and yet thoroughly defined as an inability to see quality before it's been intellectually defined

Was Quality something that you "just see" or might it be something more subtle than that, so that you wouldn't see it at all immediately, but only after a long period of time?

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

If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.

But if a group of foreign students were brought in, or, say, medieval poems out of the range of class experience were brought in, then the students' ability to rank Quality would probably not correlate as well. In a sense, he said, it's the student's choice of Quality that defines him. People differ about Quality, not because Quality is different, but because people are different in terms of experience.

Now, to take that which has caused us to create the world, and include it within the world we have created, is clearly impossible. That is why Quality cannot be defined. If we do define it we are defining something less than Quality itself.

In a reductionist view, understanding something complex requires breaking it down into its components; understand those parts, add them together, and you'll understand the big picture. And in this reductionist world, to understand cells, organs, bodies, and behavior, the best constituent part to study is genes.

The childhood capacity for empathy progresses from feeling someone's pain because you are them, to feeling for the other person, to feeling as them.

Feeling someone else's pain can be more effective for learning than just knowing that they're in pain. At its core the ACC is about self-interest, with caring about that other person in pain as an add-on.

Perhaps fifty years since we learned that reading problems of a type that we now call dyslexia aren't due to laziness but instead involve microscopic cortical malformations.

you can't begin to understand things like aggression, competition, cooperation, and empathy without biology; I say this for the benefit of a certain breed of social scientist who finds biology to be irrelevant and a bit ideologically suspect when thinking about human social behavior.

This is the essence of learning. The lecturer says something, and it goes in one ear and out the other. The factoid is repeated; same thing. It's repeated enough times and—aha!—the lightbulb goes on and suddenly you get it. At a synaptic level, the axon terminal having to repeatedly release glutamate is the lecturer droning on repetitively; the moment when the postsynaptic threshold is passed and the NMDA receptors first activate is the dendritic spine finally getting it.

Taking the time to ask your prospect the correct questions and carefully listen to the answers shows respect for them, and gives you a clearer idea of what they want.

There's no hope for a family that quarrels all the time.

Purpose to develop an agreeable spirit. I'm not suggesting that you have to agree with everything everyone says. I'm simply saying that you're not obligated to correct them! No one has appointed you Earth's guardian of truth and accuracy. One

Ideology is: intellectual ordering of the feelings; an objective connection among them that makes the subjective connection easier.

Ich weiß jetzt nichts von Rätseln. Alles geschieht: Das ist die ganze Weisheit.

Die Wahrheit ist eben kein Kristall, den man in die Tasche stecken kann, sondern eine unendliche Flüssigkeit, in die man hineinfällt.

Und es gibt auch Dinge, wo zwischen Erleben und Erfassen diese Unvergleichkeit herrscht. Immer aber ist es so, dass das, was wir in einem Augenblick ungeteilt und ohne Fragen erleben, unverständlich und verwirrt wird, wenn wir es mit den Ketten der Gedanken zu unserem bleibenden Besitze fesseln wollen. Und was groß und menscenfremd aussieht, solange unsere Worte von ferne danach langen, wird einfach und verliert das Beunruhigende, sobald es in den Tatkreis unseres Lebens eintritt.

How little one knows what one knows, or wants what one wants.

Mentre per qualcosa di molto più complesso, come la città in cui ci si trova, si vorrebbe sempre sapere esattamente quale particolare città sia. Questo distrae dall'essenziale.

Unser Leben] ist unüberwindlich verworren nur dann, wen man an sich denkt; aber in dem Augenblick, wo man nicht an sich denkt, sondern sich fragt, wie man einem anderen helfen könne, ist es sehr einfach.

Es war ihm beim Zustandekommen dieser unerwarteten Lösung einre jener außer der Regel liegenden Gedanken zu Hilfe gekommen, von denen man nicht sowohl sagen könnte, dass sie erst dann entstehen, wenn man sie nicht mehr erwartet, als vielmehr, dass ihr überraschendes Aufleuchten an das der Geliebten erinnert, die längst schon zwischen den anderen Freundinnen da war, ehe der bestürzte Freier zu verstehen aufhört, dass er ihr andere hat gleichstellen können.

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