understanding

1.

Their understanding Begins to swell and the approaching tide Will shortly fill the reasonable shores That now lie foul and muddy.

- William Shakespeare

2.

Live this day as if it will be your last. Remember that you will only find tomorrow on the calendars of fools. Forget yesterday's defeats and ignore the problems of tomorrow. This is it. Doomsday. All you have. Make it the best day of your year. The saddest words you can ever utter are, If I had my life to live over again. Take the baton, now. Run with it! This is your day! Beginning today, treat everyone you meet, friend or foe, loved one or stranger, as if they were going to be dead at midnight. Extend to each person, no matter how trivial the contact, all the care and kindness and understanding and love that you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.

- Mandino, Og

3.

Better to understand a little than to misunderstand a lot.

4.

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

- Repplier, Agnes

5.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

- Tzara, Tristan

6.

We are slaves to whatever we don't understand

- Howard, Vernon

7.

There seems to be a great misunderstanding on the part of a great many people to the effect that when you cease to believe you may cease to behave.

- Kronenberger, Louis

8.

Many a man would rather you heard his story than granted his request.

9.

True humor is fun - it does not put down, kid, or mock. It makes people feel wonderful, not separate, different, and cut off. True humor has beneath it the understanding that we are all in this together.

- Hugh Prather

10.

The growth of understanding follows an ascending spiral rather than a straight line.

- Joanne Field

11.

Until you can measure something and express it in numbers, you have only the begining of understanding.

- Lord Kelvin

12.

LEXICOGRAPHER, n. A pestilent fellow who, under the pretense of recording some particular stage in the development of a language, does what he can to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and mechanize its methods. For your lexicographer, having written his dictionary, comes to be considered "as one having authority," whereas his function is only to make a record, not to give a law. The natural servility of the human understanding having invested him with judicial power, surrenders its right of reason and submits itself to a chronicle as if it were a statue. Let the dictionary (for example) mark a good word as "obsolete" or "obsolescent" and few men thereafter venture to use it, whatever their need of it and however desirable its restoration to favor -- whereby the process of improverishment is accelerated and speech decays. On the contrary, recognizing the truth that language must grow by innovation if it grow at all, makes new words and uses the old in an unfamiliar sense, has no following and is tartly reminded that "it isn't in the dictionary" -- although down to the time of the first lexicographer (Heaven forgive him!) no author ever had used a word that _was_ in the dictionary. In the golden prime and high noon of English speech; when from the lips of the great Elizabethans fell words that made their own meaning and carried it in their very sound; when a Shakespeare and a Bacon were possible, and the language now rapidly perishing at one end and slowly renewed at the other was in vigorous growth and hardy preservation -- sweeter than honey and stronger than a lion -- the lexicographer was a person unknown, the dictionary a creation which his Creator had not created him to create. God said: "Let Spirit perish into Form," And lexicographers arose, a swarm! Thought fled and left her clothing, which they took, And catalogued each garment in a book. Now, from her leafy covert when she cries: "Give me my clothes and I'll return," they rise And scan the list, and say without compassion: "Excuse us -- they are mostly out of fashion." Sigismund Smith

- Ambrose Bierce

13.

We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.

- Lichtenberg, Georg C.

14.

Error is a supposition that pleasure and pain, that intelligence, substance, life, are existent in matter. Error is neither Mind nor one of Mind's faculties. Error is the contradiction of Truth. Error is a belief without understanding. Error is unreal because untrue. It is that which stemma to be and is not. If error were true, its truth would be error, and we should have a self-evident absurdity --namely, erroneous truth. Thus we should continue to lose the standard of Truth.

- Eddy, Mary Baker

15.

To understand one woman is not necessarily to understand any other woman.

- Mill, John Stuart

16.

To me this world is all one continued vision of fancy or imagination, and I feel flattered when I am told so. What is it sets Homer, Virgil and Milton in so high a rank of art? Why is the Bible more entertaining and instructive than any other book? Is it not because they are addressed to the imagination, which is spiritual sensation, and but immediately to the understanding or reason?

- Blake, William

17.

Seek first to understand and then to be understood.

- Covey, Stephen R.

18.

Shallow understanding accompanies poor compassion, great understanding goes with great compassion.

- Tich Nhat Han

19.

In the long course of history, having people who understand your thought is much greater security than another submarine.

- Fulbright, J. William

20.

Let no one believe that he has received the divine kiss, if he knows the truth without loving it or loves it without understanding it. But blessed is that kiss whereby not only is God recognized but also the Father is loved; for there is never full knowledge without perfect love.

- Bernard, St.