Comprehension Quotes

Life *is* complex, and, in many ways, life *is* beyond our comprehension today...Sometimes important questions have maddeningly complex or inconvenient answers that neither satisfy nor soothe.

Guy P. Harrison

Drinking is such a necessity to human life that people cannot fathom an individual who, like a child confined to a church pew, gets little enjoyment out of it and would rather do other things.

[God says] Discipleship is not limited to what you can comprehend - it must transcend all comprehension. Plunge into the deep waters beyond your own comprehension, and I will help you to comprehend even as I do. Bewilderment is the true comprehension. Not to know where you are going is the true knowledge. My comprehension transcends yours.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I'll go from world to world until I find a time and place where you can come awake in safety. And I'll tell your story to my people, so that perhaps in time the can forgive you, too. The way that you've forgiven me.

Orson Scott Card

Religion is the sense of comprehension of the totality of existence.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost... All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

The Relationship Between God And I Is Beyond Human Comprehension, Therefore, Pay No Attention To Any Descriptive Section About My Religious Affiliation, Otherwise, You Would Be Accused Of Reading The Seventh Books Of Moses.

Elijah Onyenmeriogu

Never in my life had I felt so tangibly and with such astonishment that hate, by passing successively through comprehension, mercy, and sympathy, can be transformed into love.

Nikos Kazantzakis

When you read a book put all of your effort into staying present and focus your energy towards the comprehension of each and every word and how you can apply it into your daily life.

Matthew Donnelly

When we have learnt to call storms, storms, and death, death, and birth, birth, when we have mastered the sailor's horn-book and Mr Piddington's law of cyclones, Ellis's anatomy and Lewer's midwifery, we have already made ourself half blind. We have become hypnotized by words and names. We think in words and names, not in ideas; the commonplace has triumphed, the true intellect is half crushed.

Henry de Vere Stacpoole

People think "monsters" are born without origin. But it is the monsters that have the greatest stories to tell...

But if I hope to understand in order to accept things - the act of surrender will never happen. I must take the plunge all at once, a plunge that includes comprehension and especially incomprehension. And who am I to dare to think? What I have to do is surrender. How is it done? I know however that only by walking do you know how to walk and - miracle - find yourself walking.

Clarice Lispector

Simplicity is a bliss that makes one comprehend.

Barbarus hic ego sum, quia non intelligor illis.(In this place I am a barbarian, because men do not understand me.)

Ovid

The impulse came to her clairvoyantly, and she obeyed without a sign of hesitation. Deeper comprehension would come to her of the whole awful puzzle. And come it did, yet not in the way she imagined and expected.

Algernon Blackwood

Those whom heaven helps we call the sons of heaven. They do not learn this by learning. They do not work it by working. They do not reason it by using reason. To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven. —Chuang Tse: XXIII

Ursula K Le Guin

Something was stirring in him, though; a bud of comprehension that could very well bloom into forgiveness if left unchecked.

Julie Anne Long

There are books that speak to us of our own lives with a clarity we cannot match. They prevent the morose suspicion that we do not fully belong to the species, that we lie beyond comprehension. Our embarrassments, our sulks, our envy, our feelings of guilt, these phenomena are conveyed in Austen in a way that affords us bursts of almost magical self-recognition. The author has located words to depict a situation we thought ourselves alone in feeling, and for a few moments, we see ourselves more clearly and wish to become whom the author would have wanted us to be.

Alain de Botton

The more we become able to become a child again, to keep ourselves childlike, the more we can understand that because we love the world and we are open to understanding, to comprehension, that when we kill the child in us, we are no longer.

Creativity is not intelligence, it is the ability to do what you did not know through the use of what you know.

Michael Bassey Johnson

Because we want to be inwardly secure, we are constantly seeking methods and means for this security, and thereby we create authority, the worship of another, which destroys comprehension, that spontaneous tranquility of mind in which alone there can be a state of creativeness.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Creativity expands the mind, stretches it beyond ordinary human comprehension, resulting in the mind being elastic and capable of transcending and discerning complex ideas.

Michael Bassey Johnson

When good people consider you the bad guy, you develop a heart to help the bad ones. You actually understand them.

The foundation of morality on the human sentiments of what is acceptable behavior versus repulsive behavior has always made morals susceptible to change. Much of what was repulsive 100 years ago is normal today, and - although it may be a slippery slope - what is repulsive today is possible to be normal 100 years into tomorrow; the human standard has always been but to push the envelope. In this way, all generations are linked, and one can only hope that every extremist, self-proclaimed progressive is considering this ultimate 'Utopia' to which his kindness will lead at the end of the chain.

I am afflicted with the power of thought, which is a heavy curse. The less a person thinks and inquires regarding the why and the wherefore and the justice of things, when dragging along through life, the happier it is for him, and doubly, trebly so, for her.

The world we see is a painting colored by our fears and desires.

Tim Fargo

The last thing Scripture should do is make you blind in the world. Instead, you hear everything, see everything, and feel everything because everything just so happens to point right back to it.

Labeled fools to the world are geniuses to the cosmos.

You think you're losing your mind, but do keep in mind, as long as you may, that the ability to go on thinking such a thing means it's not all gone.

I do not see how it is possible for a man to die worth fifty million of dollars, or ten million of dollars, in a city full of want, when he meets almost every day the withered hand of beggary and the white lips of famine. How a man can withstand all that, and hold in the clutch of his greed twenty or thirty million of dollars, is past my comprehension. I do not see how he can do it. I should not think he could do it any more than he could keep a pile of lumber on the beach, where hundreds and thousands of men were drowning in the sea.

Robert G. Ingersoll

Truth is only relative to those that ignore hard evidence.

Thus the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new master, and whispering in his ears sinister prophecies of coming catastrophe.In this way arose feudal Socialism; half lamentation, half lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future, at times by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart's core, but always ludicrous in its effects, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history.

Karl Marx

Thus the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new master, and whispering in his ears sinister prophecies of coming catastrophe.In this way arose feudal Socialism; half lamentation, half lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future, at times by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart's core, but always ludicrous in its effects, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history.

Karl Marx

Never take advice about never taking advice. That is an old vice of men - to dish it out without being able to take it - the blind leading the blind into more blindness.

Only in some very special cases is comprehension the point of reading--in things like recipes and "reading material." The point of reading is understanding, and comprehension is to understanding as getting wet is to swimming. You must do the one before you can hope to do the other, but you don't do the other simply because you do the one.

Richard Mitchell

Comprehension is the ability to follow an explanation.Understanding is the ability to be able to lead if needed.

Cody Edward Lee Miller

Some of the simplest of truths are also some of the most difficult of truths, but such is Christianity: 'If it's not about Christ, it's not about life.

Woman's fatal weakness is to desire sympathy and comprehension.--"Wanda

Ouida

You need to understand, comprehend and believe, “There is a goal in my birth. I have a mission, and there is something that no one but I can do.

For God to prove himself on demand, physically, would be a grave disappointment, and the strongest Christians should be considerably grateful that he chooses not to do so. The skeptic endlessly demands proof, yet God refuses to insult the true intelligence of man, the '6th sense', the chief quality, the acumen which distinguishes man from the rest of creation, faith.

[Religious belief is] outmoded and ridiculous. [Belief in gods was a] worn out but once useful crutch in mankind's journey towards truth. We consider the time has come for that crutch to be abandoned.It is a vacuous answer... To say that 'God made the world' is simply a more or less sophisticated way of saying that we don't understand how the universe originated. A god, in so far as it is anything, is an admission of ignorance. thundered over the horizon and in a few decades of observation and thought . . . arrived at an answer.I regard teaching religion as purveying lies. I came here today to de-corrupt you all.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents... some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new Dark Age.

Looking but not seeing is the hearing but not understanding of the eye.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

For God to prove himself on demand, physically, would be a grave disappointment, and the strongest Christians should be considerably grateful that he chooses not to do so. The skeptic endlessly demands proof, yet God refuses to insult the true intelligence of man, the '6th sense', the chief quality, the acumen which distinguishes man from the rest of creation, faith.

[Religious belief is] outmoded and ridiculous. [Belief in gods was a] worn out but once useful crutch in mankind's journey towards truth. We consider the time has come for that crutch to be abandoned.It is a vacuous answer... To say that 'God made the world' is simply a more or less sophisticated way of saying that we don't understand how the universe originated. A god, in so far as it is anything, is an admission of ignorance. thundered over the horizon and in a few decades of observation and thought . . . arrived at an answer.I regard teaching religion as purveying lies. I came here today to de-corrupt you all.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents... some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new Dark Age.

Looking but not seeing is the hearing but not understanding of the eye.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the cause of the state that is to follow. An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions of all things in the universe, would be able to comprehend in one single formula the motions of the largest bodies as well as the lightest atoms in the world, provided that its intellect were sufficiently powerful to subject all data to analysis; to it nothing would be uncertain, the future as well as the past would be present to its eyes. The perfection that the human mind has been able to give to astronomy affords but a feeble outline of such an intelligence.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

The knowledge that he had left me with no intent ever to return had come over me in tiny droplets of realization spread over the years. And each droplet of comprehension brought its own small measure of hurt.

When you choose to look down on something, you render yourself incapable of understanding it.

Stewart Stafford

It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

To think that we grasp the fullness of life is to say that by holding a mere drop of water in our hands we are able to understand the immensity of the ocean.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Form is what transforms the content of a work into its essence. Do you understand? The character of music arises out of its form like steam from water,’ Yury Andreevich said. ‘With solid understanding of the general laws of form, which encompass all that is amenable to formulation, one can, by groping further, perceive the individual, the particular. Then, subtracting the general, one can sense a residue where wonder lurks in its purest, most undiluted form. Herein lies the goal of theory: the more fully one grasps what is available for comprehension, the more intensely the ineffable shines.

Lyudmila Ulitskaya

Until every soul is freely permitted to investigate every book, and creed, and dogma for itself, the world cannot be free. Mankind will be enslaved until there is mental grandeur enough to allow each man to have his thought and say. This earth will be a paradise when men can, upon all these questions differ, and yet grasp each other's hands as friends. It is amazing to me that a difference of opinion upon subjects that we know nothing with certainty about, should make us hate, persecute, and despise each other. Why a difference of opinion upon predestination, or the trinity, should make people imprison and burn each other seems beyond the comprehension of man; and yet in all countries where Christians have existed, they have destroyed each other to the exact extent of their power. Why should a believer in God hate an atheist? Surely the atheist has not injured God, and surely he is human, capable of joy and pain, and entitled to all the rights of man. Would it not be far better to treat this atheist, at least, as well as he treats us?Christians tell me that they love their enemies, and yet all I ask is—not that they love their enemies, not that they love their friends even, but that they treat those who differ from them, with simple fairness.We do not wish to be forgiven, but we wish Christians to so act that we will not have to forgive them. If all will admit that all have an equal right to think, then the question is forever solved; but as long as organized and powerful churches, pretending to hold the keys of heaven and hell, denounce every person as an outcast and criminal who thinks for himself and denies their authority, the world will be filled with hatred and suffering. To hate man and worship God seems to be the sum of all the creeds.

Robert G. Ingersoll

When you read a manuscript that has been damaged by water, fire, light or just the passing of the years, your eye needs to study not just the shape of the letters but other marks of production. The speed of the pen. The pressure of the hand on the page. Breaks and releases in the flow. You must relax. Think of nothing. Until you wake into a dream where you are at once a pen flying of vellum and the vellum itself with the touch of ink tickling your surface. Then you can read it. The intention of the writer, his thoughts, his hesitations, his longings and his meaning. You can read as clearly as if you were the very candlelight illuminating the page as the pen speeds over it.

Diane Setterfield

Great minds think alike because a greater Mind is thinking through them.

Vivid simplicity is the articulation, the nature of genius. Wisdom is greater than intelligence; intelligence is greater than philosobabble.

We're very familiar with the idea that some things are so complex they're beyond our comprehension. This not only keeps us solving and experimenting but also distracted. Many things are really so simple we can't see them under our big noses.

I don’t always feel what I know I should feel.My thought crosses the river I swim very slowlyBecause the suit men made it wear weighs it down.

Olivier took a deep breath, then turned and bowed in farewell. Gersonides nodded in return, then thought of something."The manuscript you brought me, by that bishop. It argues that understanding is more important than movement. That action is virtuous only if it reflects pure comprehension, and that virtue comes from the comprehension, not the action."Olivier frowned. "So?""Dear boy, I must tell you a secret.""What?""I do believe it is wrong.