quotations about understanding
Cry out for insight and understanding. Search for them as you would for lost money or hidden treasure.
BIBLE
Proverbs 2:3-4
To acquire wisdom is to love oneself; people who cherish understanding will prosper.
BIBLE
Proverbs 19:8
Wouldn't we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife with a husband, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that's why men have invented God -- a being capable of understanding.
GRAHAM GREENE
The Quiet American
Understanding is the reward of faith.
SAINT AUGUSTINE
attributed, Wise Words and Quotes
What most contributes to mutual understanding is sharing that which makes us human.
SOUAD T. ALI
"ASU faculty, students work to combat misunderstandings between Arab, American cultures", Arizona State University, May 5, 2017
A best friend is someone who, when they don't understand, they still understand.
NANCY WERLIN
Impossible
What you don't understand you can make mean anything.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
Diary
The understanding, like the eye, whilst it makes us see and perceive all other things, takes no notice of itself: and it requires art and pains to set it at a distance and make it its own object.
JOHN LOCKE
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. Human understanding has vulgarly occupied itself with nothing but understanding, but if it would only take the trouble to understand itself at the same time it would simply have to posit the paradox.
SOREN KIERKEGAARD
journal, 1847
You know, we have little bits of understanding, glimpses, a little bit of light here and there, but there's a tremendous amount of darkness, which is a challenge. I think life would be pretty boring if we understood everything. It's better if we don't understand anything ... and know that we don't, that's the important part.
NOAM CHOMSKY
interview in Cardiff, Wales, UK, March 11, 2011
Every man should be capable of all ideas and I understand that in the future this will be the case.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote", The Garden of Forking Paths
The particulars of flat-earth devotion are easy to ridicule. But it isn't difficult to understand why people are seduced by the tenor of the message. The flat-earth movement, in its own peculiar way, appeals to the arrogance of the ignorant, arousing a dormant sense of being meant for something special. It empowers you to overcome confusion and conquer stupidity -- not the hard way, by learning and understanding, but in a way that's much easier, by redefining the things you don't understand as wrong in the first place.
CALUM MARSH
"Why the flat-earth movement is the best symbol of the increasingly diminished value of truth and intelligence", National Post, April 21, 2017
To trace the unfamiliar to the familiar ... is to understand.
ALGERNON BLACKWOOD
"The Damned", Incredible Adventures
Don't you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn't developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don't expect to see.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
The human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.
FRANCIS BACON
Novum Organum
When understanding is analyzed as an ability to make counterfactual inferences in the contexts of manipulation, prediction, and explanation, its relation to knowledge can be clarified. Understanding is only knowledge about the relations of dependence, not something mysterious added to knowledge.
PETRI YLIKOSKI
"The Illusion of Depth of Understanding in Science", Scientific Understanding: Philosophical Perspectives
A Jedi gains power through understanding and a Sith gains understanding through power.
PALPATINE
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
The human understanding is moved by those things most which strike and enter the mind simultaneously and suddenly, and so fill the imagination; and then it feigns and supposes all other things to be somehow, though it cannot see how, similar to those few things by which it is surrounded.
FRANCIS BACON
Novum Organum
What makes a subject difficult to understand -- if it is significant, important -- is not that some special instruction about abstruse things is necessary to understand it. Rather it is the contrast between the understanding of the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things that are most obvious can become the most difficult to understand. What has to be overcome is not difficulty of the intellect but of the will.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
Philosophical Occasions
The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.
ALBERT CAMUS
The Plague