Quotes about Understanding

Ones inescapable desire to accept another's differences as...

          Distinction

The fearless comfort in all that I do not know as...
          Trust

The admiration of one's life journey as...

          Respect

You excite me to transparency through...

          The beauty of truth

You humble me to wisdom through...
          The fortitude of understanding

Loving who you are in this moment through...

          The exoneration of your past

This is no coincidence...
           This familiarity defines true friendship...timeless...a decade later.

-- Kandra J Gardner

Much learning does not teach understanding. Heraclitus

"Whenever you are asked if you can do a job, tell'em, 'certainly I can!' - and get busy and find out how to do it."

Theodore Roosevelt
1858-1919, Twenty-Sixth U.S. President

One is not the victim of mentation but instead is the very originator by virtue of intention to extract projected value.  With this understanding, one is free from being dominated by the false "I" of the experiencer.  ---   Dr. David R. Hawkins

Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it isn't so.

Virtue is virtue only when it is spontaneous; virtue is virtue only when it is natural, unpractised -- when it comes out of your vision, out of your awareness, out of your understanding.

God did not evolve. Humankind's understanding of God did. God has pretty much been the same but we as human's only know a little about God. prophets have given humankind glimpses of God through the ages. Religions have interpreted and rewritten the original writings of the prophets in an effort to instill the values they believed God (and each particular religion's leadership) wanted to instill in their followers and converts. The Lord's infinite wisdom only allows humanity to get what humanity needs incrementally, depending on the evolution of the human race. These things are revealed through The Lord's Prophets. To put it more succinctly, God has not evolved, humanity has.

"The value of the personal relationship to all things is that it creates intimacy... and intimacy creates understanding... and understanding creates love."

"Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain. And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy; And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields. And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief."

~ Kahlil Gibran

"There were two men standing across from each other, each in desperate need of a helping hand. They reached out to each other, but their fingers barely touched. The man on the right wondered why the other man wouldn't reach just one inch more. Finally, frustrated, he reached forward and clasped the other man's hand. When the other man tried to hug him, he stepped back.
"Why didn't you reach just one more inch?" he demanded.
The other man was astonished.
"One more inch?" he asked. "To me it seemed like you were miles away."

'Embracing' is the key to the understanding of how to balance polarities. The waters of a brook do not accuse the rock of being in its path. The water does not say: 'Rock, I hate you, do not stand in my way or I wash you away.' The water says: 'Hi there, Rock, I grant you the right to be there, but I desire to create my energies elsewhere' -- and now the water giggles around the rock. We can learn from the water. It does not fear or hate the rock, it does not resist it either. In this sense the act of embracing should be understood.

What else is love but understanding and rejoicing in the fact that another person lives, acts, and experiences otherwise than we do and crosswise to our purposes? For love to bridge these opposites through joy it must not eliminate or deny them.

The answer is more love, not less.

"Artists are the seeds, brave enough to live and flower before humanity. Our soil is contemplation, our water, its understanding. Whether my petals be beautiful to another, to I and The Maker, they are Unique and yet, only equally as beautiful as any other. Some call that being a Dreamer. I call it, being Belov'ed."

"Mankind understands Love as the ant understands the tree... Otherwise we would no longer be human.  Rather, we would be awakened Gods in the flesh."

The search ends with the realization that there is no such thing as enlightenment. By searching, you want to be free from the self, but whatever you are doing to free yourself from the self is the self. How can I make you understand this simple thing? There is no 'how'. If I tell you that, it will only add more momentum to that (search), strengthen that momentum. That is the question of all questions: "How, how, how?"

You have no way of knowing anything about your death, now or at the end of your so-called life. Unless knowledge, the continuity of knowledge, comes to an end, death cannot take place. You want to know something about death: you want to make that a part of your knowledge. But death is not something mysterious; the ending of that knowledge is death. What do you think will continue after death? What is there while you are living? Where is the entity there? There is nothing there -- no soul -- there is only this question about after death. The question has to die now to find the answer -- your answer; not my answer -- because the question is born out of the assumption, the belief, that there is something to continue after death.

The questioner has to come to an end. It is the questioner that creates the answer; and the questioner comes into being from the answer, otherwise there is no questioner.

You know, this dialogue is only helpful when we come, both of us, to a point and realize that no dialogue is possible, that no dialogue is necessary. When I say 'understanding', 'seeing', they mean something different to me. Understanding is a state of being where the question isn't there any more; there is nothing there that says "now I understand!" -- that's the basic difficulty between us. By understanding what I am saying, you are not going to get anywhere.

If you knew what the Highest Being knows, you would be as happy as the Highest Being is happy.  Why not be that happy anyway?

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.

To explain too much is to steal a person's opportunity to learn, and stealing is against the Law.

"He knows that you can't force an understanding. You have to let it happen. It has to coalesce, not unlike love or
pudding, he supposes. You stir and stir and watch the bubbles break the surface, you wait and keep the perfect heat underneath it and if you are very patient it finally, suddenly thickens up, silky shiny smooth as if to say, 'This is what I always meant to be. Thank you for waiting. You may now lick the spoon'."

Black people are the magical faces at the bottom of society's well.  Even the poorest whites, those who must live their lives only a few levels above, gain their self-esteem by gazing down on us.  Surely, they must know that their deliverance depends on letting down their ropes.  Only by working together is escape possible.  Over time, many reach out, but most simply watch, mesmerized into maintaining their unspoken commitment to keeping us where we are, at whatever cost to them or to us (Bell).

Black people are the magical faces at the bottom of society's well.  Even the poorest whites, those who must live their lives only a few levels above, gain their self-esteem by gazing down on us.  Surely, they must know that their deliverance depends on letting down their ropes.  Only by working together is escape possible.  Over time, many reach out, but most simply watch, mesmerized into maintaining their unspoken commitment to keeping us where we are, at whatever cost to them or to us (Bell).

If I have been able to see farther than others, it was because I stood on the shoulders of giants.

I subscribe to Hellenic existential values, which is to say, nothing is truly "understood" in any penetrating or rational way until it has been traced back to its implications for ultimate values. Moralizing in the most profound and synoptic way should be the primary challenge for modern philosophers, a way of recovering the kind of articulated value-intelligence that ancient culture exercised. For most moderns there are no such things as foundational values or principles; there are only feelings, vagrant or idiosyncratic emotionalisms. To "think" in a merely abstract or conceptualizing way, free of the tasks of connoisseurial and spiritual evaluation, is in truth already a form of delusionality just in itself: it is the error that Kant describes of a bird realizing how much resistance the wind causes for it, and imagining that if only it were in empty space it could fly ever so much better. Hegel's understanding of the task of philosophy "in medias res"--having to come to see and understand not in a hypothetical vacuum or laboratory conditions in vitro but amidst the turbulence and conflicts of actual historical existence--is the only ultimately sane, rational, and humanly responsible method.

"What we now want is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth... and the elimination of egoism and pride which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife."

Modern paintings are like women:
You'll never enjoy them, if you try to understand them..