Quotes About Comprehension

When Charlie and I finish reading the long footnotes detailing the derivatives activities of major banks, the only thing we understand is that we don't understand how much risk the institution is running.

The point is, the only real tools we have are our eyes and our heads. It's not the act of seeing with our eyes alone; it's correctly comprehending what we see. Treating life as an autopsy.

I hear and I forget I see and I remember I do and I understand.

Very few really understand him, however much they may like him.

One who understands others has knowledge; one who understands himself has wisdom.

No one book of scripture can be understood by itself, any more than any one part of a tree or member of the body can be understood without reference to the whole of which it is a part.

I think they assign things to students which are way over their heads, which destroy your love of reading, rather than leading you to it. I don't understand that. Gosh.

Puzzles forced me to look at something from several angles before I moved on, to look again, and again, and possibly again because each piece—no matter how small or seemingly insignificant—was critical to the whole.

Este es el amor con las piernas." She then translated without being asked. "'This is love with legs.' My father used to say that you can tell someone you love them until you're blue in the face, but until they see that walked out, they have no idea what it means. Hence, 'love with legs.

Unstructured chat with such friends has helped me understand Mrs Thatcher, the woman. (page xxvi)

The first basis for this statement is that I know you have reached the second chapter of a nonfiction book on a public policy issue, which means you are probably well above average in academic ability—not because getting to the second chapter of this book requires that you be especially bright, but because people with below-average academic ability hardly ever choose to read books like this.

Knowledge is the harvest of attention

In the same way that Morse code reduces written language to dots and dashes, the spoken version of the code reduces speech to just two vowel sounds. The key word here is two. Two types of blinks, two vowel sounds, two different anything, really, can with suitable combinations convey all types of information.

communication simply requires

My language is the sum total of myself.

Unless man have a natural bent in accordance with nature's, he has no chance of understanding nature at all.

When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind: it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science. —WILLIAM THOMSON, LORD KELVIN

Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.

What all of what was then to be understood to be being presumed so makes something now recognizable as to what we were, in fact, then speaking of in speaking of 'whales'.

But knowledge is not as much a prerequisite to understanding as is commonly supposed. 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.

beginning of this book that the instruction in reading that it provides applies to anything you have to or want to read. However,

It is worth emphasizing, therefore, that it is precisely comprehension in reading that this book seeks to improve. You cannot comprehend a book without reading it analytically; analytical reading, as we have noted, is undertaken primarily for the sake of comprehension (or understanding).

You have not grasped a complex unity if all you know about it is how it is one. You must also know how it is many, not a many that consists of a lot of separate things, but an organized many.

My faith is in the unknown, in all that we do not understand by reason; I believe that what is beyond our comprehension is a simple fact in other dimensions, and that in the realm of the unknown there is an infinite power for good.