Quotes About Comprehension

Remember some books are meant to be tasted, some books are meant to be chewed and, finally, some books are meant to be swallowed whole.

As the historian Edward Grant explained, 'It is indisputable that modern science emerged in the seventeenth century in Western Europe and nowhere else'. ... The crucial question is: Why? My answer to this question is as brief as it is unoriginal: Christianity depicted God as a rational, responsive, dependable, and omnipotent being and the universe as his personal creation, thus having a rational, lawful, stable structure, awaiting human comprehension.

I was instructed long ago by a wise editor, If you understand something you can explain it so that almost anyone can understand it. If you don't, you won't be able to understand your own explanation. . . . Jargon is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

It is always the case, with mathematics, that a little direct experience of thinking over things on your own can provide a much deeper understanding than merely reading about them.

Although it might well be possible for a sufficiently cleverly constructed such system to preserve an illusion, for some considerable time (as with Deep Thought), that it possesses some understanding, I shall maintain that a computer system's actual lack of understanding should-in principle, at least-eventually reveal itself.

G* No individual mathematician ascertains mathematical truth solely by means of an algorithm that he or she knows to be sound.

Kant enjoyed the company of women (provided that they did not pretend to understand the Critique of Pure Reason) and

So I simply said one of the great trite truths: There is generally more than one side to a story.

As for the rest of him, his function is rather like that of an anti-computer: you feed him all kinds of carefully garnered facts, figures, and statistics and he translates them into garbage.

It's mainly the little things- all added up- that give us the final picture, that make the difference.

If he chooses instead the way of the Tantras, combining Samsara and Nirvana, comprehending the world and continuing to live in it, this one is mighty among dreamers.

I am not unmindful of your thought processes as you speak. I feel the pain in your side, twin to my own. Yes, I know these things and more.

I can't get to know you means I shall never know what you really think of me. I cannot decipher you because I do not know how you decipher me.

But if one fears or despises so much the philosophical foundations of a book, and if one demands so insistently the right to understand nothing about them and to say nothing on the subject, why become a critic?

I can see him now, going over the long French bills, studying each item, many of them being unintelligible to him.

History cannot be unwritten or written in the subjunctive, and the wholesale application of late twentieth-century values distorts the past and makes it less comprehensible.

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know. —DONALD RUMSFELD

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.

There's a difference between hearing and listening. And that's our problem. I doubt if Westwood even knows what he's got. He didn't listen, and his notes don't seem to mean much. It's going to be like picking a lock with spaghetti.

perfectly clear. To me, and to

She didn't talk. She was thinking. She often was. He knew the signs. He guessed she was processing the information she had received, examining it, turning it this way and that, until she was satisfied.

But French people understand that

He saw the same kind of things, and began to understand them. The town explained itself to him, gradually, street by street.

Not confidence—I understand confidence. What he had was knowledge.