Quotes about Understanding

Half of the confusion in the world comes from not knowing how little we need... I live more simply now, and with more peace.

To understand all is to forgive all.

The essence of love and compassion is understanding, the ability to recognize the physical, material, and psychological suffering of others, to put ourselves "inside the skin" of the other.  We "go inside" their body, feelings, and mental formations, and witness for ourselves their suffering.  Shallow observation as an outsider is not enough to see their suffering.  We must become one with the subject of our observation.  When we are in contact with another's suffering, a feeling of compassion is born in us. Compassion means, literally, "to suffer with."

If you fully awaken, you will not know yourself. Understand this, and you will understand all.

Wanting others to love you, you give away your heart. Wanting others to see you, you give away your eyes.

Through working in harmony with life's circumstances, Taoist understanding changes what others may percieve as negative into something positive.

No dogma taught by the present civilization seems to form so insuperable an obstacle in a way of a right understanding of the relations which culture sustains as to wilderness, as that which declares that the world was made especially for the uses of men. Every animal, plant, and crystal controverts it in the plainest terms. Yet it is taught from century to century as something ever new and precious, and in the resulting darkness the enormous conceit is allowed to go unchallenged.

They understand but little who understand only what can be explained.

We are looking for a way to feel more real, but we do not realize that to feel more real we have to push ourselves further into the unknown.

The earth community, the Life Community, is not the property of any one religion or group or part of the world; it is the Commons that embraces us all, our planetary home.  And it needs us as never before.  It calls to us to become, not heroes but community builders, builders of home, gatherers and embracers, bearers of hospitality, keepers of the shared space that nurtures us all.  It calls us not to go forth and come back laden with honors but to honor where we are, who we are, and from that place to reach out to connect to and honor each other in the community of life.

To embody a new paradigm of civilization - to learn to think like a planet in order to heal and nurture a planet - is not a typical hero's task.  It is more the task of a gardener.  The planet does not offer us challenges to be overcome to prove our worth or individuality; it presents us with a community to understand, a community with disparate needs and identities that are nonetheless intertwined in mutual dependencies.

The only way to change is by changing your understanding.

So for the question I go to the mystery of it and say I don’t know. I only know that I am alive and there is something that manifests in my life, that it is God and one day I am going to understand my life, probably in the day that I die, or afterwards. But I try to find good questions and not good answers.

Humor brings insight and tolerance. Irony brings a deeper and less friendly understanding.

To assume you know someone well enough that you can and do predict their behavior and mental perspective is a gross and often tragic mistake, for it eliminates that person's freedom to create his or her own opinion and drastically affects the emerging picture of the relationship.

I would like to comment on the God fiber within each living thing. This essence, this fiber of love and grace, runs in every vein, no matter how deeply buried. Each person has a God fiber, whatever their actions or hurt they have caused you or others.

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

Instead of looking at one's dreams to understand one's life, it may make more sense to look at one's life to understand one's dreams.

Hate can only exist in the absence of understanding; where understanding is present, hate cannot exist. ... Very often hate is the result of a determination not to understand, and this is why hate is so dangerous: it actually resists understanding.

'In his celebrated book, 'On Liberty', the English philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that silencing an opinion is "a peculiar evil." If the opinion is right, we are robbed of the "opportunity of exchanging error for truth"; and if it's wrong, we are deprived of a deeper understanding of the truth in its "collision with error." If we know only our own side of the argument, we hardly know even that: it becomes stale, soon learned by rote, untested, a pallid and lifeless truth.'

When I was a child, my grandmother died and was buried in the churchyard in Castlecomer, Ireland.  The following year I went there on holiday.  One day we drove to visit relatives, I in the back seat with my grandfather.  As we pass the graveled driveway leading up to the churchyard, my grandfather, thinking he was unobserved, pressed his face against the window of the car and with a small, hidden motion of his hand, waved. It was then I came to my first understanding of the majesty and vulnerability of love.

The purified, integrated mind, so perfected in its own understanding, lives in close communion with the soul radiance so that light becomes the constant companion of the mind.

The Buddhas, the World-Honored Ones, for one great cause alone appear in the world. The Buddhas, the World-Honored Ones, appear in the world because they wish to cause the beings to hear of the Buddha's knowledge and insight and thus enable them to gain purity. They appear in the world because they wish to demonstrate the Buddha's knowledge and insight to the beings. They appear in the world because they wish to cause the beings to understand. They appear in the world because they wish to cause the beings to enter into the path of the Buddha's knowledge and insight.

If only we could touch
the things of this world
at their center, if we could only hear
tiny leaves of birch
struggling toward April,
then we would know.   

As I grow to understand life less and less, I learn to love it more and more. 

When I was five years old, the world was incomprehensible.  When I was thirteen, it seemed to me much smaller, much dirtier, and depressingly predictable.  Today it still seems muddled, but once again - although in a different way - as complex as when I was a child.  With age I have voluntarily chosen certain limitations.  I don't have the energy to start over again.  To learn new skills or fight my own personality or figure out diesel engines.

Any grading system is meaningless.  Every attempt to compare cultures with the intention of determining which is the most developed will never be anything other than one more bullshit projection of Western culture's hatred of its own shadows.  There is one way to understand another culture.  Living it.  Move into it, ask to be tolerated as a guest, learn the language.  At some point understanding may come.  It will always be wordless.  The moment you grasp what is foreign, you will lose the urge to explain it.  To explain a phenomenon is to distance yourself from it.

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy.
[Variant translation: We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth.]

How can anyone say what happens, even if each of us dips a pen a hundred million times into ink?

That's the way things come clear. All of a sudden. And then you realize how obvious they've been all along.