Selected understanding quotes

1. I don't want to convert people to Buddhism - all major religions, when understood properly, have the same potential for good.

2. If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things.

3. Keep your love of nature, for that is the true way to understand art more and more.

4. It would be easier for the Devil to go to church and cross himself with holy water than for these people to comprehend the ideas which are accepted facts to us today.

5. I do not want to found anything on the incomprehensible. I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone.

6. A man must learn to understand the motives of human beings, their illusions, and their sufferings.

7. Any fool can know. The point is to understand.

8. You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.

9. From naive simplicity we arrive at more profound simplicity.

10. Man knows much more than he understands.

11. It is a barren kind of criticism which tells you what a thing is not.

12. The one exclusive sign of thorough knowledge is the power of teaching.

13. By whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the route of passion may be opened up new relationships between a man and men, and between men and Man. Drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us to know more, and not merely to spend our feelings.

14. I don't know a critic who penetrates the center of anything.

15. When you plan a journey from your mind into mine, remember to allow for the time difference.

16. Why does merely attempting to understand Reality so often seem to lead to going insane?

17. I have just discovered the truth, and can't understand why everybody isn't eager to hear it.

18. Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.

19. The Universe forces those who live in it to understand it. Those creatures who find everyday experience a muddled jumble of events with no predictability, no regularity, are in grave peril. The Universe belongs to those who, at least to some degree, have figured it out.

20. Good sense travels on the well-worn paths; genius, never. And that is why the crowd, not altogether without reason, is so ready to treat great men as lunatics.

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

22. To some extent we are all the prisoners of stereotypes; we see each other in terms of distorted and oversimplified images. Better communication in the realm of ideas, of the arts, and of science can help refashion these false images. And by seeing more clearly we may act more wisely.

23. Home is not where you live but where they understand you.

24. The continuous capacity of genius to surpass understanding remains a human constant.

25. Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.

26. That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.

27. Whatever we cannot easily understand we call God; this saves much wear and tear on the brain tissues.

28. The most dangerous lovers women have are men of Cordis's feminine temperament. Such men, by the delicacy and sensitiveness of their own organizations, read women as easily and accurately as women read each other. They are alert to detect and interpret those smallest trifles in tone, expression, and bearing, which betray the real mood far more unmistakably than more obvious signs.

29. Anyone who isn't confused really doesn't understand the situation.

30. The supernatural is the natural not yet understood.

31. Understanding is a two-way street.

32. What do you tell a man with two black eyes? Nothing, he's already been told twice.

33. It is not at all simple to understand the simple.

34. It is good to know what a man is, and also what the world takes him for. But you do not understand him until you have learnt how he understands himself.

35. Towards the avoidance of a piece of verbal confusion: What is intended to be actively destroyed must first of all have been firmly grasped; what crumbles away crumbles away, but cannot be destroyed.

36. The right understanding of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other.

37. The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

38. Oh, rather give me commentators plain, Who with no deep researches vex the brain; Who from the dark and doubtful love to run, And hold their glimmering tapers to the sun.

39. The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under which it strives to bring everything.

40. Disillusionment in living is finding that no one can really ever be agreeing with you completely in anything.

41. She sings the songs without words Songs that sailors, and blind men, and beggars have heard She knows more of love than the poets can say And her eyes are for something that won't go away.

42. Much learning does not teach understanding.

43. It is hard to be finite upon an infinite subject, and all subjects are infinite.

44. The public mind [is] a cloudy region where only the simplest shapes are discerned with any accuracy.

45. Every time we are confronted with a new revolution we take to the opium pipes of our own propaganda.

46. Shaw does not merely decorate a proposition, but makes his way from point to point through new and difficult territory. This explains why Shaw must either be taken whole or left alone. He must be disassembled and put together again with nothing left out, under pain of incomprehension; for his politics, his art, and his religion - to say nothing of the shape of his sentences - are unique expressions of this enormously enlarged and yet concentrated consciousness.

47. The human race, whose intelligence dates back only a single tick of the astronomical clock, could hardly hope to understand so soon what it all means.

48. Folks never understand the folks they hate.

49. The colored people of this country know and understand the white people better than the white people know and understand them.

50. If the underdog were always right, one might quite easily try to defend him. The trouble is that very often he is but obscurely right, sometimes only partially right, and often quite wrong; but perhaps he is never so altogether wrong and pig-headed and utterly reprehensible as he is represented to be by those who add the possession of prejudices to the other almost insuperable difficulties of understanding him.

51. Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the understanding of a problem.

52. What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it. We are to learn about fear, not how to escape from it.

53. In the early years, you fight because you don't understand each other. In the later years, you fight because you do.

54. Most true points are fine points. There never was a dispute between mortals where both sides hadn't a bit of right.

55. Where men of fine feeling are concerned there is seldom misunderstanding.

56. The infinity of God is not mysterious, it is only unfathomable; not concealed, but incomprehensible; it is a clear infinity, the darkness of the pure unsearchable sea.

57. In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.

58. It is easy to understand God as long as you don't try to explain him.

59. There is an admiration which is the daughter of knowledge.

60. When a nation gives birth to a man who is able to produce a great thought, another is born who is able to understand and admire it.

61. Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis.

62. Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.

63. Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

64. Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.

65. Countless people have attempted to define the absolute power of the world of nature. Some praise it as god, some call it the Buddha, others call it truth. Still others convert nature into a philosophy by which they attempt to sound its deepest truth. Such attempts to define the power of nature are no more than striving to escape its effects.

66. The best vision is insight.

67. If one cannot state a matter clearly enough so that even an intelligent twelve-year-old can understand it, one should remain within the cloistered walls of the university and laboratory until one gets a better grasp of one's subject matter.

68. It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.

69. The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings.

70. Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.

71. Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.

72. We must start human society from scratch; as Francis Bacon said, we must recreate human understanding.

73. He is dangerous, he is beautiful, I could drown in his understanding.

74. We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.

75. To know me is to love me. This cliche is popular for a reason, because most of us, I imagine, believe deep in our hearts that if anyone truly got to know us, they'd truly get to love us - or at least know why we're the way we are. The problem in life, maybe the central problem, is that so few people ever seem to have sufficient curiosity to do the job on us that we know we deserve.

76. Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.

77. Dear incomprehension, it's thanks to you I'll be myself, in the end.

78. Until you understand a writer's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding.

79. See one promontory, one mountain, one sea, one river and see all.

80. Everything is explicable in the terms of the behavior of a small child.

81. We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.

82. My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.

83. Even if you reject everything, it is always better to know what it is you are rejecting.

84. It is quite untrue that British people don't appreciate music. They may not understand it but they absolutely love the noise it makes.

85. Why should things be easy to understand?

86. In my death, people will understand what I was talking about.

87. Keep your love of nature, for that is the true way to understand art more and more.

88. Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a connection though we can only speak of it in images and parables.

89. The physicist may be satisfied when he has the mathematical scheme and knows how to use for the interpretation of the experiments. But he has to speak about his results also to non-physicists who will not be satisfied unless some explanation is given in plain language. Even for the physicist the description in plain language will be the criterion of the degree of understanding that has been reached.

90. The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.

91. Blind unbelief is sure to err, And scan his work in vain; God is his own interpreter, And he will make it plain.

92. To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.

93. O Lord, help me not to despise or oppose what I do not understand.

94. In order to properly understand the big picture, everyone should fear becoming mentally clouded and obsessed with one small section of truth.

95. Now, you see, if you understand what I'm saying, with your intelligence, and then take the next step and say 'But I understood it now, but I didn't feel it.' Then, next I raise the question: Why do you want to feel it? You say: 'I want something more', because that's again that spiritual greed. And you could only say that because you didn't understand it.

96. The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

97. Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.

98. The hardest thing to understand in the world is the income tax.

99. It is almost always impossible to evaluate at the time events which you have already experienced, and to understand their meaning with the guidance of their effects. All the more unpredictable and surprising to us will be the course of future events.

100. Can a man who's warm understand one who's freezing?