Understood Quotes - Page 10

• Five o'clock tea" is a phrase our "rude forefathers," even of the last generation, would scarcely have understood, so completelyis it a thing of to-day; and yet, so rapid is the March of the Mind, it has already risen into a national institution, and rivals, in its universal application to all ranks and ages, and as a specific for "all the ills that flesh is heir to," the glorious Magna Charta.

  Lewis Carroll

  Rude, Tea, Mind

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• An operation that eventually kills may be technically successful, and the man may die cured; and so a description of religion thatshowed it to be madness might first show how real and warm it was, so that if it perished, at least it would perish understood.

  George Santayana

  Real, Successful, Men

  George Santayana (2015). “Character and Opinion in the United States”, p.40, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• I'm a joker who has understood his epoch and has extracted all he possibly could from the stupidity, greed and vanity of his contemporaries.

  Pablo Picasso

  Art, Vanity, Stupidity

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• Adolescence hits boys harder than it does girls. Girls bleed a little and their breasts pop out, big deal, but adolescence lands on a guy with both feet. . . . Your body is engulfed by chemicals of rage and despair, you pound, you shriek, you batter your head against the trees. You come away wounded, feeling that life is unknowable, can never be understood, only endured and sometimes cheated.

  Garrison Keillor

  Girl, Boys, Feet

  Garrison Keillor (1994). “The Book of Guys: Stories”, Penguin Group USA

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• Men and women would be even more unhappy if they really understood one another.

  Mason Cooley

  Knowledge, Men, Unhappy

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• I understood, by dint of digging into my memories, that modesty helped me to shine, humility helped me to triumph and virtue to oppress.

  Albert Camus

  Memories, Humility, Shining

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• I never understood exactly why people get engaged--The only time I ever did the most disastrous things happened--but I feel that there's a great deal to be said for immediate matrimony always. If I once got started I'd probably have to become a mormon to cover my confusion. What I mean is that if he and she are crazy about each other it is sheer tempting God to stay apart, come what may. And if people arent crazy about each other being engaged wont help them.

  John Dos Passos

  Marriage, Crazy, Mean

  John Dos Passos (1973). “The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos”, Harvard Common Press

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• Nothing worth knowing can be understood with the mind.

  Woody Allen

  Wisdom, Knowledge, Knowing

  "Manhattan". www.imdb.com. 1979.

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• In a notable family called Stein
  There were Gertrude, and Ep, and then Ein.
  Gert's writing was hazy,
  Ep's statues were crazy,
  And nobody understood Ein.

  Bennett Cerf

  Crazy, Writing, Poetry

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• Sorrento, August. For two weeks now I haven't heard a German word or understood an Italian one. This way one can manage to live with people; everything goes like clockwork and no irksome misunderstanding can arise.

  Karl Kraus

  Communication, Italian, August

  Karl Kraus (1976). “Half-truths & one-and-a-half truths: selected aphorisms”

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• One of the most effective means of seduction that Evil has is the challenge to struggle. It is like the struggle with women, whichends in bed. A married man's true deviations from the path of virtue are, rightly understood, never gay.

  Franz Kafka

  Women, Struggle, Mean

  Franz Kafka (1991). “The Blue Octavo Notebooks”

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• I have no other pictures of the world apart from those which express evanescence, and callousness, vanity and anger, emptiness, orhideous useless hate. Everything has merely confirmed what I had seen and understood in my childhood: futile and sordid fits of rage, cries suddenly blanketed by the silence, shadows swallowed up for ever by the night.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Hate, Night, Vanity

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• The more I observed Washington, the more frequently I visited it, and the more people I interviewed there, the more I understood how prophetic L'Enfant was when he laid it out as a city that goes around in circles.

  John Mason Brown

  Circles, Cities, People

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• Watt had watched people smile and thought he understood how it was done.

  Samuel Beckett

  Smile, Laughter, People

  Samuel Beckett (2012). “Watt”, p.18, Faber & Faber

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• A true proposition is a proposition belief which would never lead to such disappointment so long as the proposition is not understood otherwise than it was intended.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Truth, Disappointment, Long

  Charles Sanders Peirce (1974). “Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce”, p.397, Harvard University Press

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• The universe, as we see it, is the result of regularly working forces, having a causal connection with each other and therefore capable of being understood by human reason.

  Ludwig Buchner

  Work, Science, Connections

  Ludwig Büchner (1891). “Force and Matter: Or, Principles of the Natural Order of the Universe. With a System of Morality Based Thereon”

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• My fatherhood made me understand my parents and to honor them more for the love they gave. My sonhood was revealed to me in its own perfection and I understood the reason the Chinese so value filiality, the responsibility of the son to honor the parents.

  Kent Nerburn

  Responsibility, Son, Perfection

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• The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious--that is, a disease not understood--in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured.

  Susan Sontag

  Cancer, Medicine, Tuberculosis

  Susan Sontag (1979). “Illness as metaphor”, Vintage

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• I have been so electrically occupied of late that I feel as if hungry for a little chemistry: but then the conviction crosses my mind that these things hang together under one law & that the more haste we make onwards each in his own path the sooner we shall arrive, and meet each other, at that state of knowledge of natural causes from which all varieties of effects may be understood & enjoyed.

  Michael Faraday

  Law, Mind, Together

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• The division between the useful arts and the fine arts must not be understood in too absolute a manner. In the humblest work of the craftsmen, if art is there, there is a concern for beauty, through a kind of indirect repercussion that the requirements of the creativity of the spirit exercise upon the production of an object to serve human needs.

  Jacques Maritain

  Art, Creativity, Exercise

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• Plato--who may have understood better what forms the mind of man than do some of our contemporaries who want their children exposed only to "real" people and everyday events--knew what intellectual experience made for true humanity. He suggested that the future citizens of his ideal republic begin their literary education with the telling of myths, rather than with mere facts or so-called rational teachings.

  Bruno Bettelheim

  Education, Plato, Children

  Bruno Bettelheim (1976). “The uses of enchantment: the meaning and importance of fairy tales”, Knopf

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• When in many dissections, carried out as opportunity offered upon living animals, I first addressed my mind to seeing how I could discover the function and offices of the heart's movement in animals through the use of my own eyes instead of through the books and writings of others, I kept finding the matter so truly hard and beset with difficulties that I all but thought, with Fracastoro, that the heart's movement had been understood by God alone.

  William Harvey

  Book, Writing, Heart

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• What will the greatest experiment discover? I have no idea!, maybe nothing!, If we won't check, we will never know. In science there is never a guarantee of success. If you understood this last sentence, then you understood the most important message of this lecture.

  Nathan Seiberg

  Science, Ideas, Important

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• The most incomprehensible talk comes from people who have no other use for language than to make themselves understood.

  Karl Kraus

  People, Use, Language

  Karl Kraus (1976). “Half-truths & one-and-a-half truths: selected aphorisms”

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• The new concept of the child as equal and the new integration of children into adult life has helped bring about a gradual but certain erosion of these boundaries that once separated the world of children from the word of adults, boundaries that allowed adults to treat children differently than they treated other adults because they understood that children are different.

  Marie Winn

  Children, Erosion, Adults

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