Quotes About Comprehension

Facts replaced understanding; and knowledge, split into a thousand isolated fragments, no longer generated wisdom.

The historian always oversimplifies, and hastily selects a manageable minority of facts and faces out of a crowd of souls and events whose multitudinous complexity he can never quite embrace or comprehend.

but which of us has read every line of the Iliad, or the Aeneid, or The Divine Comedy, or Paradise Lost? Only men of epic stomach can digest these epic tales.

For as no perfect view of a country can be taken from a flat; so it is impossible to discover the remote and deep parts of any science by standing upon the level of the same science, or without ascending to a higher.

Leonardo called "the noblest pleasure, the joy of understanding.

Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn.

Some books are to be tasted," reads a famous passage, "others to be swallowed, and some to be chewed and digested";

I'm thinking that, collectively, men are only slightly more observant than mollusks.

Mans perceptions are not bounded by organs of perception, he percieves more than sense (tho' ever so acute) can discover

Mümkün deÄŸil DüÅŸüncenin kendisinden Daha büyük bir ÅŸeyi tan?mas?

Any fool can "obey" an order,' Hamo said, darkly. 'The clever thing is to interpret it.

Well, I shall understand your lingo one of these days, cousin.

Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.

Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.

I guess maybe a talking man hasn't got the time to ever learn much about anything except words.

The trouble with modern verse is, that to comprehend it you must have recently passed through an emotional experience identical with that through which the poet himself has recently passed. The poetry of modern poets is like a pair of shoes that only those whose feet are shaped like the cobbler's feet, can wear; while the old boys turned out shoes that anybody who can walk at all can wear.

Read, read, read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read!

INTERVIEWER Some people say they can't understand your writing, even after they read it two or three times. What approach would you suggest for them? FAULKNER Read it four times.

This was what I was chasing: not the exotic, but a broad-beamed understanding of what is what.

They write for people who read with the surface of their minds, people with reading habits that make the smallest demands on them, people brought up reading for facts, who know what's going to come next and want to know what's coming next, and get angry at surprises.

The greatest pleasure is not - say - sex or geometry. It is just understanding. And if you can get people to understand their own humanity - well, that's the job of the writer.

What's in a book, is not what an author thought he put into it, it's what the reader get out of it.

Iti spun un lucru. Ce este mai apropiat decat fratele de frate, mama de copil?Ce este mai apropiat decat mana de gura, gandul de minte? E viziunea, Roger. Nu ma astept ca tu sa intelegi asta... -Dar pricep,mai incape vorba! Jocelin isi inalta chipul si deodata zambi: -Chiar intelegi? -Dar vine clipa in care viziunea nu mai e decat jocul copilului de-a-sa-zicem. -Aha! Clatina din cap, incet, atent; si luminile plutira. -Atunci nu intelegi deloc. Deloc.

Ralph era uno specialista del pensiero, ora, e poteva riconoscere il pensiero in un altro.