Quotes About Understanding

The body of reality is always richer than the mere outline sketch we call principles.

the primary and only necessary way of experiencing a work of literary art is not by "understanding" it in analytical terms; it is by thrumming to the work of art.

I figured how it maybe was a sign that a man and a woman were actually becoming something together when you could be comfortable in long silences.

Of late she'd become impatient with the inexplicit needs of boys and men and their acting so rashly on what they could not fathom and surely could not articulate. - Coal Black Horse Chapter 1

Cultivate friends you disagree with, as well as those with whom you agree, because together you'll locate the soft spots in your own thinking and find common ground to build on.

People who are aware that they are making contestable assumptions are much more likely to recognize that reasonable people of goodwill can, in fact, disagree—even about matters of profound human and moral significance.

What is love?/One name for it is knowledge.

History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.

Willie went out and buttonholed folks on the street and tried to explain things to them. You could see Willie standing on a street corner, sweating through his seersucker suit, with his hair down in his eyes, holding an old envelope in one hand and a pencil in the other, working out figures to explain what he was squawking about, but folks don't listen to you when your voice is low and patient and you stop them in the hot sun and make them do arithmetic.

Oh, Anne, why did you do it?     It was the one question I had never meant to ask.     For a moment she did not answer. Then, without raising her eyes, she said in a low voice, He wasn't like anybody else. Not anybody else I'd ever known. And I love him. I love him, I guess. I guess that is the reason.     I sat there and reckoned I had asked for that one.

But wanting don't make a thing true. You don't have to live forever to figure that out.

I had not understood then what I think I have now come to understand: that we can keep the past only by having the future, for they are forever tied together. Therefore

Jack Burden could read those words, but how could he be expected to understand them? They could only be words to him, for to him the world then was simply an accumulation of items, odds and ends of things like the broken and misused and dust-shrouded things gathered in a garret. Or it was a flux of things before his eyes (or behind his eyes) and one thing had nothing to do, in the end, with anything else.

This inner peace of mind occurs on three levels of understanding. Physical quietness seems the easiest to achieve, although there are levels and levels of this too, as attested by the ability of Hindu mystics to live buried alive for many days. Mental quietness, in which one has no wandering thoughts at all, seems more difficult, but can be achieved. But value quietness, in which one has no wandering desires at all but simply performs the acts of his life without desire, that seems the hardest.

Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the physic predecessor of all real understanding.

ÄŒlovÄ›k se dívá tam, kam jde a kde je, a v?bec tomu nerozumí. Pak se ale oto?í, podívá se, kde už byl, a za?ne se mu vynoÃ…â"¢ovat jistý vzorec. A pokud ten vzorec promítne do budoucna, m?že pak ob?as na nÄ›co zajímavého pÃ…â"¢ijít.

I avoid opinions," Nissim said. "It's easier that way to accept both answers equally, and deny both of them at the same time. That's how I treat problems that I don't understand.

Understanding, like a muscle, increases with use. The more you use it the more you have. That is why problems are interesting. They help you to apply your knowledge and to prove the Law. If it were not for your problems, you would vegetate. You would have no way of using or applying the Truth.

If supremacy of conscience means anything, it means that the inner integrity of the individual is more important than any mental construct. If love means anything, it means accepting others in their differences from oneself as well as in their similarities.

Faith is not merely a way of knowing; it is also a way of participating.

there's no reason why something should lose its power simply because it turns out to have layers of complexity that were not initially available to us, which we slowly attain.

El verdadero sanador, el verdadero sabio, es el que permanece sabio entre aquellos que todavía no han despertado. Ten valor, y permanece en pie.

Picasso has magical eyes. He sees the world so differently than we do, but he is able to make us understand what he sees. That's what a truly great artist does

I don't think I can even imagine what a culture that's been developing steadily for a billion years ought to be like. Disembodied electrical essences, maybe. Ghostly creatures flitting in and out of the eighth, ninth, and tenth dimensions. Cosmic minds that know all, perceive all, understand all. Maybe