Understanding The World Quotes

• The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

  Albert Einstein

  Love, Inspirational, Life

  Albert Einstein, Harry Woolf (1980). “Some strangeness in the proportion: a centennial symposium to celebrate the achievements of Albert Einstein”, Addison Wesley Publishing Company

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  Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.

  Albert Einstein

  Love, Inspirational, Life

  Albert Einstein (2010). “The Ultimate Quotable Einstein”, p.252, Princeton University Press

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• The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding.

  Albert Camus

  Life, Hate, War

  "The Plague". Book by Albert Camus, 1947.

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• Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.

  Maya Angelou

  Life, Travel, Laughter

  Maya Angelou (2011). “Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now”, p.8, Bantam

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• Every person has their pantheon - the Bible, Hollywood, Shakespeare - their way of understanding the world.

  Ron Suskind

  Understanding, Hollywood, World

  "'A Pathway, Not a Prison'". Interview with Hanna Rosin, www.slate.com. April 1, 2014.

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• Anger and intolerance are the twin enemies of correct understanding.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Anger, Interesting, Understanding

  "Glorious Thoughts of Gandhi: Being a Treasury of about Ten Thousand Valuable and Inspiring Thougths of Mahatma Gandhi, Classified Under Four Hundred Subjects".

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• The relationship between science and the humanities is two-way. Science changes our view of the world and our place in it. In the other direction, the humanities provide the store of ideas and images and language available to us in understanding the world. The exploding star of A.D. 1054, the Crab Nebula, was sighted and documented by the Chinese, but nowhere mentioned in the West, where the Aristotelian notion of the immortality of stars still held sway. We often do not see what we do not expect to see.

  Alan Lightman

  Stars, Views, Ideas

  Alan Lightman (2000). “Great Ideas in Physics”, p.4, McGraw Hill Professional

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• We have got to change our ethics and our financial system and our whole way of understanding the world. It has to be a world in which people live rather than die; a sustainable world. It could be great.

  Vivienne Westwood

  People, Understanding, Way

  "The Saturday interview: Vivienne Westwood". Interview with Stuart Jeffries, www.theguardian.com. December 2, 2011.

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• Do you know, my son, with what little understanding the world is ruled?

  Pope Julius III

  War, Son, Understanding

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• Whenever you feel like criticizing any one... just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Thankful, Kindness, Attitude

  "The Great Gatsby". Book by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925.

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• Reading has always been life unwrapped to me, a way of understanding the world and understanding myself through both the unknown and the everyday. If being a parent consists often of passing along chunks of ourselves to unwitting-often unwilling-recipients, then books are, for me, one of the simplest and most sure-fire ways of doing that.

  Anna Quindlen

  Reading, Book, Fire

  Anna Quindlen (2010). “Thinking Out Loud: On the Personal, the Political, the Public and the Private”, p.114, Ballantine Books

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• The absurd, with its rupture of rationality-of conventional ways of seeing the world-is in fact an accurate and a productive way of understanding the world.

  William Kentridge

  Understanding, World, Rupture

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• Art makes better humans, art is necessary in understanding the world and art makes people happy.  Undeniably, art is not optional.

  Nathan Sawaya

  Art, People, Understanding

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• Theology is not only about understanding the world; it is about mending the world.

  Miroslav Volf

  Understanding, World, Mending

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• To not know math is a severe limitation to understanding the world.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Beer, Math, Understanding

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• I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.

  Richard Dawkins

  Death, Atheist, Learning

  "The Two Types of Faith" by Greg Cootsona, www.huffingtonpost.com. February 17, 2016.

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• Someone with a fresh mind, one not conditioned by upbringing and environment, would doubtless look at science and the powerful reductionism that it inspires as overwhelmingly the better mode of understanding the world, and would doubtless scorn religion as sentimental wishful thinking. Would not that same uncluttered mind also see the attempts to reconcile science and religion by disparaging the reduction of the complex to the simple as attempts guided by muddle-headed sentiment and intellectually dishonest emotion?

  Peter Atkins

  Powerful, Simple, Thinking

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• I don't have the slightest interest in gold. I like understanding what works and what doesn't in human systems. To me that's not optional; that's a moral obligation. If you're capable of understanding the world, you have a moral obligation to become rational. And I don't see how you become rational hoarding gold. Even if it works, you're a jerk.

  Charlie Munger

  Understanding, Gold, Hoarding

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• Maps can be a remarkably powerful tool for understanding the world and how it works, but they show only what you ask them to.

  Max Fisher

  Powerful, Understanding, Tools

  Source: www.washingtonpost.com

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• Forgiveness and the release of the past open the creative flow of life, supporting all levels of mind, heart, body, emotion, and spirit. This energy flow determines the state of our health, our desire to create and procreate, our willingness to develop our gifts, and how we use or deny the life force that we are given as human beings. . . . by choosing to let go of the past, our fears, and our negative patterns or reactions to life, we are suddenly funded with a resurgence of life force, which propels us into a newfound way of being and a very different way of understanding the world.

  Jamie Sams

  Letting Go, Heart, Past

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• We forge gradually our greatest instrument for understanding the world - introspection. We discover that humanity may resemble us very considerably - that the best way of knowing the inwardness of our neighbors is to know ourselves.

  Walter Lippmann

  Knowledge, Knowing, Understanding

  Walter Lippmann, Clinton Rossiter, James Lare (1982). “The Essential Lippmann: A Political Philosophy for Liberal Democracy”, p.135, Harvard University Press

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• I had tremendous fun fooling around with the way people talked about songs, just the way that became another way of understanding the world.

  Greil Marcus

  Song, Fun, People

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• My father was a world-class scientist and my mother was a prolific painter. I could see that my parents had completely different ways of knowing and understanding the world, and relating to it. My father approached things through scientific inquiry and exploration, while my mother experienced things through her emotions and senses.

  Jon Kabat-Zinn

  Mother, Father, Class

  "Mindfulness in the Modern World: An Interview With Jon Kabat-Zinn". Omega Institute Interview, www.huffingtonpost.com. October 7, 2012.

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• When a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.

  George Steiner

  Understanding, World, Way

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• As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to take a certain distance from it.

  Karl Ove Knausgard

  Pain, Distance, Perspective

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