Understanding

Understanding

Alan Dean Foster:
Living gives you a better understanding of life. I would hope that my characters have become deeper and more rounded personalities. Wider travels have given me considerably greater insight into how cultural differences affect not only people, but politics and art.
Albert Einstein:
If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.
Albert Schweitzer:
Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate.
Alice Walker:
One thing that never ceases to amaze me, along with the growth of vegetation from the earth and of hair from the head, is the growth of understanding.
Anatole France:
It is better to understand a little than to misunderstand a lot.
Anita Hill:
What we really need to be understanding is that all of these things matter and they all stem from the fact that certain people live with power and authority and they want to maintain it.
Antoinette Brown Blackwell:
Nature is just enough; but men and women must comprehend and accept her suggestions.
Audre Lorde:
The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.
Blaise Pascal:
You always admire what you really don’t understand.
Bryant H. McGill:
An intelligent person is never afraid or ashamed to find errors in his understanding of things.
Carl Jung:
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding about ourselves.
Carl Jung:
Science is the tool of the Western mind and with it more doors can be opened than with bare hands. It is part and parcel of our knowledge and obscures our insight only when it holds that the understanding given by it is the only kind there is.
Diane Arbus:
Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding.
Elbert Hubbard:
The man who is anybody and who does anything is surely going to be criticized, vilified, and misunderstood. This is part of the penalty for greatness, and every man understands, too, that it is no proof of greatness.
Eric Hoffer:
There would be no society if living together depended upon understanding each other.
Frank Herbert:
The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand.
G. I. Gurdjieff:
Without self knowledge, without understanding the working and functions of his machine, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself and he will always remain a slave.
Georg C. Lichtenberg:
We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.
Helen Keller:
I do not want the peace that passeth understanding. I want the understanding which bringeth peace.
Henry David Thoreau:
We shall see but little way if we require to understand what we see. How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding! How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile!
Heraclitus:
Much learning does not teach understanding.
Immanuel Kant:
All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.
Jean Rostand:
When a scientist is ahead of his times, it is often through misunderstanding of current, rather than intuition of future truth. In science there is never any error so gross that it won’t one day, from some perspective, appear prophetic.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:
The man of understanding finds everything laughable.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:
So long as you live and work, you will be misunderstood; to that you must resign yourself once and for all. Be silent!
John Calvin:
Is it faith to understand nothing, and merely submit your convictions implicitly to the Church?
John Locke:
The improvement of understanding is for two ends: first, our own increase of knowledge; secondly, to enable us to deliver that knowledge to others.
Kahlil Gibran:
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
Laozi (Lao Tzu, Lao Tse):
The power of intuitive understanding will protect you from harm until the end of your days.
Mary Catherine Bateson:
Insight, I believe, refers to the depth of understanding that comes by setting experiences, yours and mine, familiar and exotic, new and old, side by side, learning by letting them speak to one another.
Molleen Matsumura:
Love is more than just a feeling: it’s a process requiring continual attention. Loving well takes laughter, loyalty, and wanting more to be able to say, “I understand” than to hear, “You’re right.” (1999)
Noam Chomsky:
There are no magic answers, no miraculous methods to overcome the problems we face, just the familiar ones: honest search for understanding, education, organization, action that raises the cost of state violence for its perpetrators or that lays the basis for institutional change — and the kind of commitment that will persist despite the temptations of disillusionment, despite many failures and only limited successes, inspired by the hope of a brighter future.
Oscar Wilde:
The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it’s dead for you.
Proverbs 17:28:
Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise: and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Is it so bad to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
To be great is to be misunderstood.
Rene Descartes:
The two operations of our understanding, intuition and deduction, on which alone we have said we must rely in the acquisition of knowledge.
Richard Dawkins:
After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked — as I am surprisingly often — why I bother to get up in the mornings.
Robert McCloskey:
I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I’m not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.
Robert S. McNamara:
War is so complex it’s beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend. Our judgment, our understanding, are not adequate. And we kill people unnecessarily.
Rollo May:
Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.
Samuel Richardson:
People of little understanding are most apt to be angry when their sense is called into question.
Sandra Cisneros:
But I deal with this meditating and by understanding I’ve been put on the planet to serve humanity. I have to remind myself to live simply and not to overindulge, which is a constant battle in a material world.
Sidney and Suzanne Simon:
Forgiveness is freeing up and putting to better use the energy once consumed by holding grudges, harboring resentments, and nursing unhealed wounds. It is rediscovering the strengths we always had and relocating our limitless capacity to understand and accept other people and ourselves.
Sigmund Freud:
Were we fully to understand the reasons for other people’s behavior, it would all make sense.
Stephen Covey:
Seek first to understand, then to be understood.
Susan Sarandon:
So I would hope they would develop some kind of habit that involves understanding that their life is so full they can afford to give in all kinds of ways to other people. I consider that to be baseline spirituality.
Thomas Carlyle:
Do not be embarrassed by your mistakes. Nothing can teach us better than our understanding of them. This is one of the best ways of self-education.
Tony Robbins:
To effectively communicate, we must realize that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding as a guide to our communication with others.
Upton Sinclair:
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
V. S. Naipaul:
I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.
Walter Lippmann:
Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible.