Quotes About Comprehension

Do not question me, she said coldly. You do not know which questions to ask, and you would comprehend less than half the answers if I gave them. Which I will not.

The first step to creating something was to figure out its parts. Master Luhhan had taught Perrin that on his first day at the forge. You couldn't make a spade without understanding how the handle fit to the blade. You couldn't make a hinge without knowing how the two leaves moved with the pin. You couldn't even make a nail without knowing its parts: head, shaft, point. Understand the pieces, Perrin.

Intelligence is the ability to take information and make it meaningful.

First you get the feeling, then you figure out why.

To define something is to subordinate it to a tangle of intellectual relationships. And when you do that you destroy real understanding.

Definitions are the foundation of reason. You can't reason without them.

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

Persons tend to think and feel exclusively in one mode or the other and in doing so tend to misunderstand and underestimate what the other mode is all about.

He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have been working.

This is the source of the trouble. Persons tend to think and feel exclusively in one mode or the other and in doing so tend to misunderstand and underestimate what the other mode is all about. But no one is willing to give up the truth as he sees it, and as far as I know, no one now living has any real reconciliation of these truths or modes. There is no point at which these visions of reality are unified. And

What has become an urgent necessity is a way of looking at the world that does violence to neither of these two kinds of understanding and unites them into one.

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

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

when you think categorically, you have trouble seeing how similar or different two things are. If you pay lots of attention to where boundaries are, you pay less attention to complete pictures.

If you pay lots of attention to where boundaries are, you pay less attention to complete pictures.

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.

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

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

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.

every coin has three sides

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. –F. Scott Fitzgerald

He really did not hear me when I said

It is simple. That is why the idea is missed.