Understood Quotes - Page 39

The unicorn halted in her slow, desperate round of the cage, realizing for the first time that the magician understood her speech. He smiled, and she saw that his face was frighteningly young for a grown man-untraveled by time, unvisited by grief or wisdom. "I know you," he said.

Peter S. Beagle

Grief, Men, Speech

Peter S. Beagle (2003). “A fine and private place: The last unicorn”

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...do not the bewitching power of all studies lie in that they continually open up to us new, unsuspected horizons, not yet understood, which entice us to proceed further and further in the penetration of what appears at first sight only in vague outline?

Peter Kropotkin

Lying, Sight, Horizon

Peter Kropotkin (2014). “Memoirs of a Revolutionist”, p.87, Courier Corporation

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I thought of a high school report I did on the Belgian artist Rene Magritte and a quote I once read from him, something about his favorite walk being the one he took around his own bedroom. He said that he never understood the need for people to travel because all the poetry and perspective you're ever going to get you already posses. Anais Nin had the same idea. We see the world as we are. So if it's the same brain we bring with us every time we open our eyes, what's the difference if we're looking at an island cove or a pocket watch?

Sloane Crosley

School, Eye, Artist

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God's law is 'right reason.' When perfectly understood it is called 'wisdom.' When applied by government in regulating human relations it is called 'justice.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Government, Law, Justice

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What is this gypsy passion for separation, this readiness to rush off when we've just met? My head rests in my hands as I realize, looking into the night that no one turning over our letters has yet understood how completely and how deeply faithless we are, which is to say: how true we are to ourselves.

Marina Tsvetaeva

Passion, Night, Hands

Marina Tsvetaeva (2011). “Bride of Ice: New Selected Poems”, p.32, Carcanet

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Quantum theory thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe. It shows that we cannot decompose the world into independently existing smallest units. As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated "building blocks," but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole. These relations always include the observer in an essential way. The human observer constitute the final link in the chain of observational processes, and the properties of any atomic object can be understood only in terms of the object's interaction with the observer.

Fritjof Capra

Nature, Block, Science

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When you've understood this scripture, throw it away. If you can't understand this scripture, throw it away. I insist on your freedom.

Jack Kerouac

Wisdom, Positivity, Scripture

Jack Kerouac, “The Scripture Of The Golden Eternity”

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Now I know I am an intellectual. I saw Malcolm Muggeridge on the television last night, and I understood nearly every word. It all adds up. A bad home, poor diet, not liking punk. I think I will join the library and see what happens.

Sue Townsend

Home, Night, Thinking

Sue Townsend (1991). “Adrian Mole, from Minor to Major: The Mole Diaries : the First Ten Years”

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Everything was becoming allegorical, understood by the group mind, and especially this: "You're either on the bus...or off the bus.

Tom Wolfe

Mind, Groups, Becoming

Tom Wolfe (2008). “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”, p.97, Macmillan

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I don't think it is enough appreciated how much an outdoor book the Bible is. It is a "hypaethral book," such as Thoreau talked about - a book open to the sky. It is best read and understood outdoors, and the farther outdoors the better. Or that has been my experience of it. Passages that within walls seem improbable or incredible, outdoors seem merely natural. This is because outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders; we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread.

Wendell Berry

Wall, Book, Thinking

Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.311, Counterpoint

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Job found contentment and even joy, outside the context of comfort, health or stability. He understood the story was not about him, and he cared more about the story then he did about himself.

Donald Miller

Jobs, Joy, Contentment

Donald Miller (2009). “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life”, p.197, Thomas Nelson Inc

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Why don’t people’s hearts tell them to continue following their dreams?” the boy asked the alchemist. “Because that’s what makes a heart suffer most, and hearts don’t like to suffer." From then on, the boy understood his heart. He asked it, please, never to stop speaking to him. He asked that, when he wandered far from his dreams, his heart press him and sound the alarm. The boy swore that, every time he heard the alarm, he would heed its message.

Paulo Coelho

Dream, Heart, Boys

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And so began something that had not quite begun and would not soon end, with many people in many places moving off in directions and on missions which they all mistakenly thought they understood. That was just as well. The future was too fearful for contemplation, and beyond the expected, illusory finish lines were things fated by the decisions made this morning -- and, once decided, best unseen.

Tom Clancy

Morning, Moving, People

Tom Clancy (2010). “Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan”, p.2389, Penguin

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a perception of the cosmic unity of this higher level. And a feeling of timelessness, the feeling that what we know as time is only the result of a naive faith in causality - the notion that A in the past caused B in the present, which will cause C in the future, when actually A, B, and C are all part of a pattern that can be truly understood only by opening the doors of perception and experiencing it... in this moment... this supreme moment... this Kairos.

Tom Wolfe

Past, Doors, Feelings

Tom Wolfe (2008). “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”, p.163, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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It was possible, he understood, for a person's life to become just a long series of mistakes, and that the end, when it came, was just one more mistake in a chain of bad choices. The thing was, most of these mistakes were actually borrowed from other people. You took their bad ideas, and for whatever reason, made them your own.

Justin Cronin

Mistake, Ideas, Long

"The Passage". Book by Justin Cronin, 2010.

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It is quite clear that between love and understanding there is a very close link...He who loves understands, and he who understands loves. One who feels understood feels loved, and one who feels loved feels sure of being understood.

Paul Tournier

Understanding, Links, Clear

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And then Serafina understood something for which the witches had no word: it was the idea of pilgrimage. She understood why these beings would wait for thousands of years and travel vast distances in order to be close to something important, and how they would feel differently for the rest of time, having been briefly in its presence. That was how these creatures looked now, these beautiful pilgrims of rarefied light, standing around the girl with the dirty-face and the tartan skirt and the boy with the wounded hand who was frowning in his sleep.

Philip Pullman

Beautiful, Girl, Distance

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Marley was dead, to begin with ... This must be distintly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.

Charles Dickens

Stories, Wonderful, Marley

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...She's understood the power of stories. Their magical ability to refill the wounded part of people.

Kate Morton

People, Stories, Refills

Kate Morton (2009). “The Forgotten Garden”, p.327, Simon and Schuster

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I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.

Thomas Sowell

Money, Greed, Want

"Barbarians inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays". Book by Thomas Sowell, 1999.

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The world could be fixed of its problems if every child understood the necessity of their existence.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Children, World, Problem

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She suddenly understood why she had let him kiss her in the diner, why she had wanted him at all. She wanted to control him. He was every arrogant boyfriend that had treated her mother badly. He was every boy that told her she was too freaky, who had laughed at her, or just wanted her to shut up and make out. He was a thousand times less real than Roiben.

Holly Black

Mother, Real, Kissing

Holly Black (2012). “Tithe”, p.100, Simon and Schuster

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My sister, who never understood most of the things I wanted her to, might have been able to understand what had happened to me in this summer of weddings and beginnings. And she was right. The first boy was always the hardest.

Sarah Dessen

Summer, Boys, Might

Sarah Dessen (2004). “That Summer”, p.198, Penguin

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When I was younger, I'd wanted someone to promise me that things would work out and nothing bad would ever happen again. But I understood now that that was a child's wish. No one could promise that. No one. The grown-ups could try, but they couldn't promise, not and mean it.

Laurell K. Hamilton

Children, Mean, Work Out

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Rumpty!" he muttered, which was very rude if you were one of the few people in the universe who understood what it meant.

Paul Cornell

People, Rude, Ifs

"Doctor Who The Scream Of The Shalka". Book by Paul Cornell, July 31, 2013.

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