Understanding
The following are a collection of some of my favorite quotes. This section of quotes is on understanding. If you have any of interest to add, please email me at sunergos@juno.com . Other quotation pages: Character Judgment Cycles
1. Things don't change. You change your way of looking, that's all. - Carlos Castaneda (1931- )
2. For all right judgment of any man or thing it is useful, nay essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad. - Thomas Carlyle (1828)
3. Knowledge is an infinite series of images in the memory. Understanding, which penetrates into their significance, is the power to perceive their essence and interrelationship. - Kabbalah (B.C. 1200?-700? A.D.)
4. To make no mistake is not in the power of man; but from their errors and mistakes the wise and good learn wisdom for the future. - Plutarch (46-120 A.D.)
5. In seeking Wisdom, the first stage is silence, the second is listening, the third remembrance, the fourth practicing, the fifth teaching. - Solomon Ibn Gabirol (1021?-1053)
6. The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think - rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with the thoughts of other men. - James Beattie (1735-1803)
7. The secret of education is respecting the pupil. - Emerson (1803-1882)
8. Words are but wind; and learning is nothing but words; ergo, learning is nothing but wind. Swift (1667-1745)
9. The supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things - the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit. - Johnson (1709-1784)
10. Truth does not depart from human nature. If what is regarded as truth departs from human nature, it may not be regarded as truth. - Li Chi (Confucianism)
11. True goodness is loving your fellow man. True wisdom is knowing your fellow men. - Analects 12, 22 Confucianism
12. Truth is said to be the one unequaled means of purification of the soul. Truth is the ladder by which man ascends to heaven, as a ferry plies from one bank of a river to another. - Narader Smriti 1, 210 (Hindu)
13. Purity of body comes by water, purity of mind by truthfulness. The lamp of truth is a lamp of the wise. Vedas (Hindu)
14. No great thing is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen. - Epictetus
15. Steadfastness is a noble quality, but unguided by knowledge or humility, it becomes rashness, or obstinacy. - Swartz
16. The tree needs two arms to span its girth sprang from the tiniest shoot. ...A journey of a thousand miles began with a single step. - Lao Tse
17. Joy it is not in things, it is in us. - Richard Wagner
18. He is a wise man who does grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has. - Epictetus
19. The best thing to give your enemy is forgiveness; to an opponent tolerance; to a friend, your heart; to your child, a good example; to a father, deference; to your mother, conduct that will make her proud of you; to yourself, respect; to all men, charity. - John Balfour
20. Love everything in the universe, because sun and the earth are but one body. - Ancient Chinese Maxim
21. IMMORALITY (I)
It is only immoral
to be dead-alive
sun-extinct
and busy putting out the sun
in other people
IMMORALITY (II)
The real immorality, as far as I can see it
lies in forcing yourself on somebody else
against all your deeper instincts and your
intuition.
- D.H. Lawrence
22. Democracy is good. I say this because other systems are worse. - Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964)
23. To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know,that is true knowledge. - Thoreau (1817-1862)
24. A man only understands what is akin to something already existing in himself. - Henri Frederic Amiel (1821-1881)
25. Knowledge by itself does not give understanding. Nor is understanding increased by an increase of knowledge alone. Understanding depends upon the relation of knowledge to being...It appears only when a man feels and senses what is connected with it. - Gurdjieff (1873-1949)
26. There is a great difference between knowing a thing and understanding it. You can know a lot about something and not really understand it. - Charles Kettering (1876-1958)
27. Whatever we well understand we express clearly, and words flow with ease. - Nicholas Boileau (1636-1711)
28. Knowledge is the antidote to fear. - Emerson (1803-1882)
29. The best part of our knowledge is that which teaches us where knowledge leaves off and ignorance begins. - Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809- 1894)
30. What we do not understand we do not possess. - Goethe (1749-1832)
31. Experience precedes understanding. - Jean Piaget
32. What we have to learn to do, we learn by doing. - Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)
33. Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence. - Robert Frost (1874-1963)
34. Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave. - Baron Brougham Henry (1778-1868)
35. Liberty without learning is always in peril; learning without liberty is always in vain. - John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)
36. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. - Walter Pater (1839-1894)
37. In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few. - Shunro Suzuki (1870-1966)
38. Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. - Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919)
39. A life isn't significant except for its impact on other lives. - Jackie Robinson (1919-1972)
40. Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity. Louis Pasteur (1822-1895)
41. You never really lose until you quit trying. - Mike Ditka (1939- )
42. Time does not become sacred for us until we have lived it. - John Burroughs (1837-1921)
43. Nothing contributes so much to tranquilizing the mind as a steady purpose--a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye. - Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851)
44. Verily God does not reward man for what he does, but for what he is. - Chaung Tzu 31 (Taoism)
45. Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action. - Benjamin Disraeli
46. The grand essentials to happiness in life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for. - Joseph Addison
47. In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it; They must not do too much of it; And, they must have a sense of success in it.- John Ruskin
48. The mind earns by doing. The heart earns by trying. - from an Outer Limits episode
49. If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has as much as to be out of danger? - Thomas Huxley (1825-1895)
50. Failure makes people bitter and cruel. Success improves the character of the man. - W. Somerset Maugham
51. All of us do not have equal talent, but all of us should have an equal opportunity to develop our talents. - John F. Kennedy
52. Any piece of knowledge I acquire today has a value at this moment exactly proportioned to my skill to deal with it. Tomorrow, when I know more, I recall that piece of knowledge and use it better. - Mark Van Doren
53. Everywhere, we learn only from those whom we love. - Goethe
54. A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access. - Nietzsche (Ecce Homo, 1888)
55. To be fond of learning is to be near to knowledge. - Tze-Sze (The Doctrine of the Mean)
56. Only when you have crossed the river can you say the crocodile has a lump on his snout. - Ashanti proverb
57. Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself--in fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience. - Elizabeth Bowen
58. You cannot create experience. You must undergo it. - Albert Camus
59. Experience is the only teacher, and we get his lesson indifferently in any school.- Emerson
60. Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. - Emerson
61. Only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches. - English proverb
62. An experience teaches only the good observer; but far from seeking a lesson in it, everyone looks for an argument in experience, and everyone interprets the conclusion in his own way. - Andre Gide
63. You know more of a road by having travelled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world. - William Hazlitt
64. I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past. - Patrick Henry
65. He who neglects to drink of the spring of experience is likely to die of thirst in the desert of ignorance. - Ling Po
66. No man's knowledge here can go here can go beyond his experience. - John Locke
67. One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning. - James Russell Lowell
68. No one can shed light on vices he does not have or afflictions he has ever experienced. - Antonio Machado
69. Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience. - George Bernard Shaw
70. There's nothing in the world so unfair as a man who has no experience of life; he thinks nothing is done right except what he's doing himself. - Terence (169 B.C.)
71. If you command wisely, you'll be obeyed cheerfully. - Thomas Fuller, M.D.
72. The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on. - Walter Lippmann
73. The real leader has no need to lead--he is content to point the way. - Henry Miller
74. What a man dislikes in his superiors, let him not display in the treatment of his inferiors. - Tsang Sin
75, He that complies against his will, Is of his own opinion still. - Samuel Butler
76. Ethical axioms are found and tested not very differently from the axioms of science. Truth is what stands the test of experience. - Einstein
77. Truth fears no trial. - Thomas Fuller, M.D.
78. The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it. - John Stuart Mill
79. The truth is always the strongest argument. - Sophocles
80. You can prove almost anything with the evidence of a small enough segment of time. How often, in any search for truth, the answer of the minute is positive, the answer of the hour qualified, the answers of the year contradictory! - Edwin Way Teale
81. He that hath knowledge spareth his words. - Proverbs (B.C. 1000? - 200?)
82. Whoever acquires knowledge but does not practice it is as one who ploughs but does not sow. - Saadi (1184-1291)
83. All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions. - Leonardo Da Vinci (1452 - 1519)
84. The word of knowledge, strictly employed, implies three things: truth, proof, and conviction. - Richard Whately (1787-1863)
85. To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge. - Disraeli (1804-1881)
86. By three method we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by expenence which is the bitterest. - Confucius (B.C. 551-479)
87. Common sense in an umcommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.- Samuel Coleridge (1772-1834)
88. The sage does not hoard. The more he helps others, the more he benefits himself. The more he gives to others, the more he gets himself. The Way of Heaven does one good but never does one harm. The Way of the sage is to act but not to compete. - Lao-Tzu (fl. B.C. 600)
89. Perfect wisdom has four parts: Wisdom, the principle of doing things aright. Justice, the principle of doing things equally in public and private. Fortitude, the principle of not fleeing danger, but meeting it. Temperance, the principle of subduing desires and living moderately. - Plato (B.C. 427?
90. Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, These three alone lead life to sovereign power. - Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)
91. What government is the best? That which teaches us to govevn ourselves. - Goethe (1749-1832)
92. Yield to him who opposes you; by yielding you conquer. Ovid(B.C.43 - 18A.D.)
93. Truth obtains victory, not untruth. Truth is the way that leads to the regions of light. - Upanishads (c. B.C. 800)
94. Our plans miscarry if they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind.- Seneca (B.C. 3-65 A.D.)
95. Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value. - Einstein (1879-1955)
96. There is something good in all seeming failures. You are not to see that now. Time will reveal it. Be patient. - Sivananda (born 1887)
97. Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. - William Saroyan (1908-1981)
98. I have three precious things which I hold fast and prize. The first is gentleness; the second is frugality; the third is humility, which keeps me from putting myself before others. Be gentle and you can be build; be frugal and you can he liberal; avoid putting yourself before others and you can become a leader among men. - Lao-Tzu (fl. B.C. 600)
99. Experience never misleads; what you are misled by is only your judgment, and this misleads you by anticipating results from experience of a kind that is not produced by your experiments. - Leonardo Da Vinci
100. Wise it is to comprehend the whole. - Young (1683-1765)
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