Understanding Quotes - Page 36

• My understanding of the meaning of a book is that the book itself disappears from sight, that it is chewed alive, digested and incorporated into the system as flesh and blood which in turn creates new spirit and reshapes the world.

  Henry Miller

  Book, Sight, Blood

  Henry Miller (1966). “Tropic of Capricorn”

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• When you write a song that is so personal to yourself, it's really hard to picture anybody else understanding it when you're singing it. There's things that are very broad and universal topics. Those are the songs that might work for others.

  Butch Walker

  Song, Writing, Singing

  Source: www.washingtontimes.com

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• We can't literally talk with everybody else on the planet or even with representatives of every group. But we can be in favor of the respectful exchange of ideas in ways that don't presuppose that all the right answers are on our own side. Still, we should all have moral bottom lines. Once genocide or torture begins the priority shifts from understanding to stopping it. One hope I have for the global conversation as instantiated in human rights treaties is that we are slowly coming to consensus on certain moral baselines.

  Kwame Anthony Appiah

  Priorities, Moral, Human Rights

  Source: www.washingtonpost.com

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• The understanding that we reach a point where we stop becoming something and start ending as something. That comes at different times in different points in different people's lives, and obviously there are lots of people who experience the presence of death much more keenly and much earlier than I did. But we all come to grips with it eventually.

  John Hodgman

  People, Different

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• The differences between religions are only differences involving the pathways that lead toward the practice of directly experiencing higher levels of perception and understanding. All religions are paths to a metaphorical mountain-top variously named Wisdom, enlightenment, self-realization, the kingdom of heaven, righteousness, etc. Differences that lead to violence and persecution are based on a corrupted relationship to the teachings and practices of religion.

  Jacob Needleman

  Teaching, Heaven, Perception

  Source: www.watkinsmagazine.com

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• When you are thinking about whether you have an obligation to try to save people's lives, you don't usually think, well, how close by are they? Understanding what we are reacting to can change the way we think about the problem. If, biologically, morality evolved to help us get along with individuals in our community, it makes sense that we have heartstrings that can be tugged - and that they are not going to be tugged very hard from far away. But does that make sense? From a more reflective moral perspective, that may just be a cognitive glitch.

  Joshua Greene

  Thinking, Perspective, Community

  Source: www.slate.com

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• What I realized is that if we're going to be able to have a theory about what happens in, for example, nature there has to ultimately be some rule by which nature operates. But the issue is does that rule have to correspond to something like a mathematical equation, something that we have sort of created in our human mathematics? And what I realized is that now with our understanding of computation and computer programs and so on, there is actually a much bigger universe of possible rules to describe the natural world than just the mathematical equation kinds of things.

  Stephen Wolfram

  World, Kind, Computer

  Source: bigthink.com

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• I think in America, especially today, our relationship to war is incredible distant. Yet narratives of war have such a primal power in this culture. They mainline directly into a whole series of emotional reactions and understandings of American patriotism, masculinity, and all of these other things.

  Phil Klay

  War, Emotional, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I have always found small mammals enough like ourselves to feel that I could understand what their lives would be like, and yet different enough to make it a sort of adventure and exploration to see what they were doing.

  Donald Griffin

  Life, Adventure, Science

  Donald Redfield Griffin (1959). “Science Study Series”

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• One of the great secrets of the day is to know how to take possession of popular prejudices and passions, in such a way as to introduce a confusion of principles which makes impossible all understanding between those who speak the same language and have the same interests.

  Niccolo Machiavelli

  Passion, Confusion, Secret

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• Understanding God is not attained by calling into session all arguments for and against Him, in order to debate whether He is a reality or a figment of the mind. God cannot be sensed as a second thought, as an explanation of the origin of the universe. He is either the first and the last, or just another concept.

  Abraham Joshua Heschel

  Atheist, Reality, Understanding God

  Abraham Joshua Heschel (1976). “God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism”, p.120, Macmillan

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• We lean to our own understanding, or we bank on service and do away with prayer, and consequently by succeeding in the external we fail in the eternal, because in the eternal we succeed only by prevailing prayer.

  Oswald Chambers

  Prayer, Succeed, Failing

  Oswald Chambers (2011). “The Quotable Oswald Chambers”, p.311, Discovery House

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• ...dreams were dreams and reality was reality and she felt people were better off understanding the difference.

  Libba Bray

  Dream, Reality, Differences

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• My heart is singing for joy this morning! A miracle has happened! The light of understanding has shone upon my little pupil's mind, and behold, all things are changed!

  Anne Sullivan Macy

  Education, Morning, Teaching

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• I hope you will no longer accuse me of a lack of delicacy. as I now count on your understanding.

  Gustav Mahler

  Delicacy

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• No one has ever been able to control his thinking, although people may tell the story of how they have. I don't let go of my thoughts-I meet them with understanding. Then they let go of me.

  Byron Katie

  Inspirational, Letting Go, Thinking

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• Those who have chosen the path of least resistance in life, who cannot bear to bring themselves to make a stern value-judgment in criticism of their own most intimate feelings, achieve what they deserve: not self-understanding but radical self-superficialization, not a discovered but a self-ascribed identity that explains nothing, reveals nothing, means nothing, and ultimately accomplishes nothing culturally or intellectually.

  Kenny Smith

  Mean, Thinking, Accomplish Nothing

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• A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.

  Frank Herbert

  Inspirational, Business, Moving

  Frank Herbert (2003). “Dune”, p.35, Penguin

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• In a story you only had to wish, you only had to write it down and you could have the world...It seemed so obvious now that it was too late: a story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it. Reading a sentence and understanding it were the same thing; as with the crooking of a finger, nothing lay between them. There was no gap during which the symbols were unraveled.

  Ian Mcewan

  Reading, Writing, Mean

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• Speaking, writing, and discoursing are not mere acts of communication; they are above all acts of compulsion. Please follow me. Trust me, for deep feeling and understanding require total committment.

  Trinh T. Minh-ha

  Communication, Writing, Feelings

  Trinh T. Minh-Ha (2009). “Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism”, p.52, Indiana University Press

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• If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves and of threatening ourselves with death Perhaps the world can teach us as when everything seems dead but later proves to be alive.

  Pablo Neruda

  Moving, Sadness, Silence

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• we can learn to trust our maternal selves and to have faith in the innate goodness and purity of our children - even when we feel overwhelmed and the kids are pushing all our buttons. we can support one another....we can be understanding of each other and easier on ourselves.

  Katrina Kenison

  Children, Kids, Self

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• We cannot understand without wanting to understand, that is, without wanting to let something be said...Understanding does not occur when we try to intercept what someone wants to say to us by claiming we already know it.

  Hans-Georg Gadamer

  Trying, Doe, Want

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• Our spirits have their own private way of understanding each other, of becoming intimate, while our external persons are still trapped in the commerce of ordinary words, in the slavery of social rules. Souls have their own needs and their own ambitions, which the body ignores when it sees that it's impossible to satisfy them or achieve them.

  Luigi Pirandello

  Ambition, Soul, Ordinary

  Luigi Pirandello (1987). “The late Mattia Pascal”, Eridanos Library

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• I knew that our time together was almost over, I asked her if she liked sports, she asked me if I liked chess, I asked her if she liked fallen trees, she went home with her father, the center of me followed her, but I was left with the shell of me, I needed to see her again, I couldn't explain my need to myself, and that's why it was such a beautiful need, there's nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Beautiful, Sports, Father

  Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel”, p.113, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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