Explore Quotes on Understanding

The greatest obstacle to international understanding is the barrier of language

Being a Christian is more like falling in love than understanding a series of ideas.

Ask me if Christianity (my version of it, yours, the Pope's, whoever's) is orthodox, meaning true, and here's my honest answer: a little, but not yet. Assuming by Christianity you mean the Christian understanding of the world and God, Christian opinions on soul, text, and culture I'd have to say that we probably have a couple of things right, but a lot of things wrong, and even more spreads before us unseen and unimagined. But at least our eyes are open! To be a Christian in a generously orthodox way is not to claim to have the truth captured, stuffed, and mounted on the wall.

Tony [Campolo] and I might disagree on the details, but I think we are both trying to find an alternative to both traditional Universalism and the narrow, exclusivist understanding of hell [that unless you explicitly accept and follow Jesus, you are excluded from eternal life with God and destined for hell].

Next to the coming to a good understanding with a new mistress, I love a quarrel with an old one.

We don't have faith in reason; we use reason because, unlike revelation, it produces results and understanding. Even discussing why we should use reason employs reason!

There must be understanding between the artist and the people. In the best ages of art that has always been the case. Genius can probably run on ahead and seek out new ways. But the good artists who follow after genius — and I count myself among these — have to restore the lost connection once more.

The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn't seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.

I can maintain my sense of the sacredness of existence only by understanding my own limitations and losing my self-importance.

Those who hear and do not understand are like the deaf. Of them the proverb says: "Present, they are absent."

Our problem is that sound is not important in our culture. We know the world from the visual, not from the other senses. I had to be taught other ways of understanding.

If you want to be listened to, you should put in time listening.

People don't listen to understand. They listen to reply. The collective monologue is everyone talking and no one listening.

When you are deeply contemplative, you listen more carefully and understand things which cannot be articulated.

In a multi-racial society, trust, understanding and tolerance are the cornerstones of peace and order.

Human existence may be simpler than we thought. There is no predestination, no unfathomed mystery of life. Demons and gods do not vie for our allegiance. Instead, we are self-made, independent, alone, and fragile, a biological species adapted to live in a biological world. What counts for long-term survival is intelligent self-understanding, based upon a greater independence of thought than that tolerated today even in our most advanced democratic societies.

You can go through your whole life telling yourself that life is logical, life is prosaic, life is sane. Above all sane. And I think it is. I've had a lot of time to think about that. And what I keep coming back to is [her] dying declaration: 'So you understand that when we increase the number of variables, the axioms themselves never change.'

We need to promote greater tolerance and understanding among the peoples of the world. Nothing can be more dangerous to our efforts to build peace and development than a world divided along religious, ethnic or cultural lines. In each nation, and among all nations, we must work to promote unity based on our shared humanity.

All finite things have their roots in the infinite, and if you wish to understand life at all, you cannot tear out its context. And that context, astounding even to bodily eyes, is the heaven of stars and the incredible procession of the great galaxies.

If this seems complex, the reason is because Tao is both simple and complex. It is complex when we try to understand it, and simple when we allow ourselves to experience it.

Understanding people's difficulties and-just as crucial-helping people understand their own difficulties and teaching them concrete ways to help themselves will help them better deal with their own lives and, in turn, ours.