Best 4500 quotes in «understanding quotes» category

In Western culture, virtually everything is understood through the process of storytelling, often to the detriment of reality. When we recount history, we tend to use the life experience of one person — the “journey” of a particular “hero,” in the lingo of the mythologist Joseph Campbell — as a prism for understanding everything else.

I often find that people either underestimate what they know, or overestimate it. Very rarely do they gauge their own knowledge appropriately.

I only wish you could spend just five minutes beneath my skin and feel what it’s like. Feel the savage swarming magic I feel.

{On the death of Hale's esteemed friend and fellow scientist, Luther Burbank. Burbank was much beloved by the population unil in an interview he revealed that he was an atheist. After this, the public turned on him and sent him thousands of letters with death threats. This upset the kind-hearted Burbank, who tried to amiably reply to each letter, so much that it ultimately led to his death} . . . he was misled into believing that logic, kindliness, and reason could convince and help the bigoted. He fell sick. The sickness was fated to be his last. What killed Luther Burbank, at just that time and in just that abrupt and tragic fashion, was his baffled, yearning, desperate effort to make people understand. His desire to help them, to clarify their minds, and to induce them to substitute fact for hysteria drove him beyond his strength. He grew suddenly old attempting to make reasonable a people which had been unreasonable through twenty stiff-necked generations. . . He died, not a martyr to truth, but a victim of the fatuity of blasting dogged falsehood.

I pass and I stay, like the Universe.

I protect myself by refusing to know myself.

I realize many wonderful things about language - "realize" in the sense of feeling or understanding intuitively: I realize such things most often when I am greatly concerned with another person's feelings. I think such realization is one gift which human beings may give each other. I'm not much good at analysis or scholarly efforts with language, probably because I don't value them as much as I value understanding, which is informed by that which is deeply felt before it is examined.

I remember seeing this video for the first time in college - miserable, half-drunk on Keystone Light, a Camel Light smoldering in my mouth, about to desperately tap-dance my way through another social interaction - and saying out loud: "I fucking *get* you, Bee Girl.

I remember when we found the first population of living Cerion agassizi in central Eleuthera. Our hypothesis of Cerion's general pattern required that two predictions be affirmed (or else we were in trouble): this population must disappear by hybridization with mottled shells toward bank-interior coasts and with ribby snails toward the bank-edge. We hiked west toward the bank-interior and easily found hybrids right on the verge of the airport road. We then moved east toward the bank-edge along a disused road with vegetation rising to five feet in the center between the tire paths. We should have found our hybrids but we did not. The Cerion agassizi simply stopped about two hundred yards north of our first ribby Cerion. Then we realized that a pond lay just to our east and that ribby forms, with their coastal preferences, might not favor the western side of the pond. We forded the pond and found a classic hybrid zone between Cerion agassizi and ribby Cerions. (Ribby Cerion had just managed to round the south end of the pond, but had not moved sufficiently north along the west side to establish contact with C. agassizi populations.) I wanted to shout for joy. Then I thought, "But who can I tell; who cares?" And I answered myself, "I don't have to tell anyone. We have just seen and understood something that no one has ever seen and understood before. What more does a man need?

I saw something I could never forget. I saw lifetimes of acknowledgement, fear, wisdom, questioning, and understanding in a child's eye. It was the worst thing I would ever witness.

I sat in a world of sorrow trying to figure things out. I couldn’t because the world isn’t supposed to be figured out. You’re not supposed to get it. You’re supposed to flow with it and things come or don’t. It’s that simple, but we think everything’s complex when it’s just sitting right in front of us.

I saw that there is no Nature, That Nature doesn’t exist, That there are hills, valleys, plains, That there are trees, flowers, weeds, That there are rivers and stones, But there is not a whole these belong to, That a real and true wholeness Is a sickness of our ideas.

I see you better in music, I hear you better in wind, I feel you more in a flooding moonlight, that understands nothing, but darkness and silence.

I sensed that one of the most significant events of my life had taken place: that which tells us about ourselves exists in fragments, scattered in time and space... I sensed that my life was being refracted in the present moment like a beam in a magnifying glass, refracted and reset by this lens of understanding; I learned what I had come for, and that knowledge, it turns out, had always been with me, in my memory.

Is not most talking A crazed defense of a crumbling fort? I thought we came here To surrender in Silence.

Someday I will understand Auschwitz. This was a brave statement but innocently absurd. No one will ever understand Auschwitz. What I might have set down with more accuracy would have been: Someday I will write about Sophie's life and death, and thereby help demonstrate how absolute evil is never extinguished from the world. Auschwitz itself remains inexplicable. The most profound statement yet made about Auschwitz was not a statement at all, but a response. The query: "At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?" And the answer: "Where was man?

I, sometimes, fear that probably I'll just keep changing cities, and may be someday I'll also travel the world, but never find another soul who thinks exactly the way I do.

I spent days and nights staring at the blank page, searching the deepest corners of my mind: who have I been, what have I seen, what did I learn? I thought about all the nights I've spent outside, all the times I laid down to cry and how I took a deep breath every morning and decided to simply go on. Because what else is there to do? Decide that this is it? I quit, I'm done? Oh if I could find words to justify those feelings I've carried. I could write the thickest of books with explosions of emotions from a young girl's lost heart. I could make you see, make you hear, make you feel, at least a tiny fragment of what's out there.

..i spill into the kind of silence only Khalil Gibran would understand.

I stopped writing in a way they would understand because it wasn’t for them or even him. It was for I to understand, for I to make sense, and for I to let go of it.

Is your division of Understanding into Greater and Lesser common to all Sufis? Nothing which is put into words is common to all Sufis.

I take it as a compliment when somebody calls me crazy. I would be offended if I was one of the sheeple, one of the sleepwalkers in the matrix or part of the collective hallucination we call 'normal

It appears, at least from my perspective, that each and every position in Jiu Jitsu regardless of the seeming complexity is really governed by no more than a handful of minimum viable products. Pursue to understand these essentials, and you will see that complexity is a myth perpetuated by lack of understanding, and it is this understanding which is possible for each of us.

It becomes a lot easier to understand people when you realize that not everyone wants or is after the same thing.

It appears that the paradigm of the modern Church has mainly been based on some fragments of the truth rather than the comprehensive totality of understanding God and His Kingdom

It could be that God has absconded but spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem.

It didn’t affect him because he couldn’t fathom how I felt. He never saw how I held or how I dealt. And when a breeze hits, his first thought is never a scent. We worked in different ways and different places, which were divided by a constellation.

It doesn't mean,' she shrugged. 'It just is

It had always struck her as odd that so many Turks memorized Arabic prayers without having the slightest idea what they were saying. Whether English or Turkish, Peri loved words. She held them in her palms like eggs about to hatch, their tiny hearts beating against her skin, full of life. She inquired into their meanings -- hidden and manifest; she studied their etymologies. But for countless believers, the words in the prayers were holy sounds one was expected less to penetrate than to imitate -- an echo without a beginning or an end, in which the act of thinking was subsumed by the act of mimicking.

It has an unhappy effect upon the human understanding and temper, for a man to be compelled in his gravest investigation of an argument, to consider, not what is true, but what is convenient.

It has been the practice of all Christian commentators on the Bible, and of all Christian priests and preachers, to impose the Bible on the world as a mass of truth, and as the word of God; they have disputed and wrangled, and have anathematized each other about the supposable meaning of particular parts and passages therein; one has said and insisted that such a passage meant such a thing, another that it meant directly the contrary, and a third, that it meant neither one nor the other, but something different from both; and this they have called understanding the Bible. It has happened, that all the answers that I have seen to the former part of 'The Age of Reason' have been written by priests: and these pious men, like their predecessors, contend and wrangle, and understand the Bible; each understands it differently, but each understands it best; and they have agreed in nothing but in telling their readers that Thomas Paine understands it not.

It happens, therefore, that readers of the book, or of any other book built about a central concept, fall into three mutually exclusive classes: (I) The class of those who miss the central concept-(I have known a learned historian to miss it) -not through any fault of their own,-they are often indeed well meaning and amiable people,-but simply because they are not qualified for conceptual thinking save that of the commonest type. (II) The class of those who seem to grasp the central concept and then straightway show by their manner of talk that they have not really grasped it but have at most got hold of some of its words. Intellectually such readers are like the familiar type of undergraduate who "flunks" his mathematical examinations but may possibly "pull through" in a second attempt and so is permitted, after further study, to try again. (III) The class of those who firmly seize the central concept and who by meditating upon it see more and more clearly the tremendous reach of its implications. If it were not for this class, there would be no science in the world nor genuine philosophy. But the other two classes are not aware of the fact for they are merely "verbalists" In respect of such folk, the "Behaviorist" school of psychology is right for in the psychology of classes (I) and (II) there is no need for a chapter on "Thought Processes"- it is sufficient to have one on "The Language Habit.

it has to be emphasized that if the pain were readily describable most of the countless sufferers from this ancient affliction would have been able to confidently depict for their friends and loved ones (even their physicians) some of the actual dimensions of their torment, and perhaps elicit a comprehension that has been generally lacking; such incomprehension has usually been due not to a failure of sympathy but to the basic inability of healthy people to imagine a form of torment so alien to everyday experience.

It helps to not confuse theological philosophers with evangelists. There is a difference but objectively neither better than the other: an evangelist's mission is to convert; a theological philosopher's mission is to build an understanding of a position.

I think about this, not like someone thinking, but like someone breathing, And I look at flowers and I smile... I don’t know if they understand me Or if I understand them, But I know the truth is in them and in me And in our common divinity Of letting ourselves go and live on the Earth And carrying us in our arms through the contented Seasons And letting the wind sing us to sleep And not have dreams in our sleep.

I think, actually, that none of us understands anyone else very well, because we're all too shy to show what matters the most. If you ask me, it's a major design flaw. We ought to be able to say, Here, look what I am. I think it would be quite a relief.

I think it was a sense of being completely swallowed up by nature that gave the prairie its powerful attraction.There is nothing like it in all of Europe. Even high up on a Swiss glacier one is still conscious of the toy villages below, the carefully groomed landscape of multicolored fields,the faraway ringing of a church bell. It is all very beautiful, but it does not convey the utmost escape. I believe, with the Indians, that a landscape influences and forms the people living on it and that one cannot understand them and make friends with them without also understanding, and making friends with, the earth from which they came.

I think that's the way people absorb television. All the explanations in Doctor Who are there if that's your bag, but they're not essential to your enjoyment of it. An awful lot of storytelling isn't really about making people understand — it's about making people care.

I think the need to believe in religion is and always was a need to know. Satisfying the NEED TO KNOW, be it by really knowing, by thinking we know or by believing we know, is very comforting for man. Be it by “direct” knowledge, Be it by “emotional” knowledge, Be it by “gut-felt” knowledge, Be it by “spiritual” knowledge, Be it by “transcendental” knowledge, Be it by “meditative” knowledge, Be it by “inspiration”, Be it by “revelation”, Be it knowing by faith or Be it by understanding, We definitely are one humanity under “need to know”.

I think we understand each other a little better, and that's never a bad thing.

It is almost as if ideas set in mathematical form melt and become liquid and just as rivers can, from the most humble beginnings, flow for thousands of miles, through the most varied topography bringing nourishment and life with them wherever they go, so too can ideas cast in mathematical form flow far from their original sources, along well-defined paths, electrifying and dramatically affecting much of what they touch. pp. xii - xiii.

It is a sad state of affairs that I do not know of any astronomer who fully understands the energy in their own daily environment. Until that changes, Dark Energy will always be a mystery to the astronomical community.

It is a joy to share good advice. It takes a grateful ear to listen wisely. It's always up for us to take the right action and fulfilling path that can truly serve for what is the best.

It is a part of probability that many improbabilities will happen.

It is a pity that dead men are still impacting the world while men who are still alive are wasting away, roaming the world without an understanding of what to do with their time.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

It is called understanding when one accepts other’s talks of wisdom; but, where is the wisdom filled talk in this era?

It is easy to fall, but hard to rise.

It is easier to not know than to not comprehend, for not knowing implies that the world is large, and that is a fact. Not comprehending is a far more personal fault.

It is considered as conduct when it comes into exact understanding.