Quotes About Comprehension

We need to interpret interpretations more than to interpret things.

It is a dangerous and fateful presumption, besides the absurd temerity that it implies, to disdain what we do not comprehend. For after you have established, according to your fine undertstanding, the limits of truth and falsehood, and it turns out that you must necessarily believe things even stranger than those you deny, you are obliged from then on to abandon these limits.

If I am a man of some reading, I am a man of no retentiveness.

He had seen lakes and rivers, but Connla had never seen an ocean, and its very size was beyond his comprehension.  "Where does it end?" he asked Blathine.  "It does not end. The ocean is everything. All the land is merely an interruption in the sea."  Her words made no sense; such things could not be possible.

In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you

Finally, do not try to understand every word or page of a difficult book the first time through. This is the most important rule of all; it is the essence of inspectional reading. Do not be afraid to be, or to seem to be, superficial. Race through even the hardest book. You will then be prepared to read it well the second time.

We are not told, or not told early enough so that it sinks in, that mathematics is a language, and that we can learn it like any other, including our own. We have to learn our own language twice, first when we learn to speak it, second when we learn to read it. Fortunately, mathematics has to be learned only once, since it is almost wholly a written language.

Great speed in reading is a dubious achievement; it is of value only if what you have to read is not worth reading. A better formula is this: Every book should be read no more slowly than it deserves, and no more quickly than you can read it with satisfaction and comprehension.

We do not have to know everything about something in order to understand it; too many facts are often as much of an obstacle to understanding as too few. There is a sense in which we moderns are inundated with facts to the detriment of understanding.

When we speak of someone as "well-read," we should have this ideal in mind. Too often, we use that phrase to mean the quantity rather than the quality of reading. A person who has read widely but not well deserves to be pitied rather than praised. As Thomas Hobbes said, "If I read as many books as most men do, I would be as dull-witted as they are.

Enlightenment is achieved only when, in addition to knowing what an author says, you know what he means and why he says it.

You will find that your comprehension of any book will be enormously increased if you only go to the trouble of finding its important words, identifying their shifting meanings, and coming to terms. Seldom does such a small change in habit have such a large effect.

Getting more information is learning, and so is coming to understand what you did not understand before. But there is an important difference between these two kinds of learning.

Think of yourself as a detective looking for clues to a book's general theme or idea, alert for anything that will make it clearer. Heeding the suggestions we have made will help you sustain this attitude. You will be surprised to find out how much time you will save, pleased to see how much more you will grasp, and relieved to discover how much easier it can be than you supposed.

You cannot begin to deal with terms, propositions, and arguments—the elements of thought—until you can penetrate beneath the surface of language.

The reader who fails to ponder, or at least mark, the words he does not understand is headed for disaster.

The student can read as fast as his mind will let him, not as slow as his eyes make him.

Every book should be read no more slowly than it deserves, and no more quickly than you can read it with satisfaction and comprehension.

In tackling a difficult book for the first time, read it through without ever stopping to look up or ponder the things you do not understand right away.

One constant is that, to achieve all the purposes of reading, the desideratum must be the ability to read different things at different—appropriate—speeds, not everything at the greatest possible speed. As Pascal observed three hundred years ago, "When we read too fast or too slowly, we understand nothing." Since

É um erro acreditar que ler muito e ler bem são a mesma coisa.

O esclarecimento só ocorre quando, além de saber o que o autor escreveu, você também sabe o que ele quis dizer com o que escreveu e por que escreveu o que escreveu.

If you are reading a book that can increase your understanding, it stands to reason that not all of its words will be completely intelligible to you. If you proceed as if they were all ordinary words, all on the same level of general intelligibility as the words of a newspaper article, you will make no headway toward interpretation of the book. You might just as well be reading a newspaper, for the book cannot enlighten you if you do not try to understand it.

The First Level of Reading: Elementary Reading