Understood Quotes - Page 5

• The word education must not be understood in the sense of teaching but of assisting the psychological development of the child.

  Maria Montessori

  Children, Teaching, Development

  Maria Montessori (1978). “The Secret of Childhood”, p.28, Orient Blackswan

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• Being positive is like going up a mountain. Being negative is like sliding down a hill. A lot of times, people want to take the easy way out, because it's basically what they've understood throughout their lives.

  Chuck D

  People, Being Positive, Mountain

  Interview with Nathan Rabin, www.avclub.com. June 13, 2001.

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• I knew that if I wrote a new book every six months or every year, if I continued to read great books, eventually I would write something worthy of publication. I understood I might be in my forties or my fifties or even my sixties, but I felt confident that it would happen.

  Augusten Burroughs

  Book, Writing, Years

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• There Is No God. This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Creative, Deities, Spirit

  Percy Bysshe Shelley, Donald H. Reiman, Neil Fraistat (2004). “The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley”, p.263, JHU Press

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• The meaning of the directions in kata is not well understood, and frequently mistakes are made in the interpretation of kata movements. In extreme cases, it is sometimes heard that "this kata moves in 8 directions so it is designed for fighting 8 opponents" or some such nonsense.

  Kenwa Mabuni

  Mistake, Moving, Fighting

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• I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.

  Black Elk

  Mother, Children, Father

  "Black Elk Speaks". Book by John Gneisenau Neihardt, 1932.

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• By amusing myself with all these games, all this nonsense, all these picture puzzles, I became famous... I am only a public entertainer who has understood his time.

  Pablo Picasso

  Games, Idlers, Amusement

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• The people no longer seek consolation in art. But the refined people, the rich, the idlers seek the new, the extraordinary, the extravagant, the scandalous. I have contented these people with all the many bizarre things that come into my head. And the less they understand, the more they admire it. By amusing myself with all these games, all this nonsense, all these picture puzzles, I became famous... I am only a public entertainer who has understood his time.

  Pablo Picasso

  Art, Games, People

  Attributed in Wash. Post, 30 Nov. 1952. The Post article is quoting an article in Quick Magazine from the summer of 1951. According to a letter by William S. Rubin in the New York Times, 5 Jan. 1969, this is "a trumpery originated in Il Libro Nero published by Giovanni Papini in 1951."

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• Implicit in the activist conception of government is the assumption that you can take the good things in a complex system for granted, and just improve the things that are not so good. What is lacking in this conception is any sense that a society, an institution, or even a single human being, is an intricate system of fragile inter-relationships, whose complexities are little understood and easily destabilized.

  Thomas Sowell

  Government, Littles, Assumption

  Thomas Sowell (1993). “Is Reality Optional?: And Other Essays”, Hoover Inst Press

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• The word “art” is something the West has never understood. Art is supposed to be a part of a community. Like, scholars are supposed to be a part of a community... Art is to decorate people’s houses, their skin, their clothes, to make them expand their minds, and it’s supposed to be right in the community, where they can have it when they want it... It’s supposed to be as essential as a grocery store... that’s the only way art can function naturally.

  Amiri Baraka

  Art, Clothes, People

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• If there is one subject in this world worthy of being discussed, worthy of being understood, it is the question of intellectual liberty. Without that, we are simply painted clay.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Intellectual, Liberty, Clay

  Robert Green Ingersoll (1929). “The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll...”

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• It seems that the ancient Medicine Men understood that listening to another's story somehow gives us the strength of example to carry on, as well as showing us aspects of ourselves we can't easily see. For listening to the stories of others - not to their precautions or personal commandments - is a kind of water that breaks the fever of our isolation. If we listen closely enough, we are soothed into remembering our common name.

  Mark Nepo

  Men, Medicine, Names

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• Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others; but of the three, the only quite trustworthy one is the last. The acts of a nation may be triumphant by its good fortune; and its words mighty by the genius of a few of its children: but its art, only by the general gifts and common sympathies of the race.

  John Ruskin

  Art, Children, Book

  St. Mark's Rest preface (1877)

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• Equity knows no difference of sex. In its vocabulary the word man must be understood in a generic, and not in a specific sense.

  Herbert Spencer

  Sex, Men, Vocabulary

  Herbert Spencer (2016). “Social Statics: Great Essays”, p.127, VM eBooks

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• The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.

  Walter Benjamin

  Fruit, Seeds

  Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt (1968). “Illuminations”, Schocken Books Incorporated

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• The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid.

  Antonin Artaud

  Order, Theatre, Passionate

  Antonin Artaud (1958). “The Theater and Its Double”, p.122, Grove Press

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• Being that can be understood is language.

  Hans-Georg Gadamer

  Famous Inspirational, Understanding, Language

  Hans-Georg Gadamer (2008). “Philosophical Hermeneutics”, p.31, Univ of California Press

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• A false conclusion once arrived at and widely accepted is not easily dislodged and the less it is understood the more tenaciously it is held.

  Georg Cantor

  Science, Power, Accepted

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• The drinking of coffee is an absolute sin! Our Glorious Prophet did not partake of coffee because he knew it dulled the intellect, caused ulcers, hernia and sterility; he understood that coffee was nothing but the Devil's ruse.

  Orhan Pamuk

  Drinking, Coffee, Devil

  Orhan Pamuk (2011). “My Name Is Red”, p.14, Faber & Faber

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• Pain is not something to be feared; it is something to be understood.

  Pete Egoscue

  Pain

  "The No. 1 Move to Do for a Pain-Free Body" by Pete Egoscue, www.huffingtonpost.com. April 4, 2016.

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• Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power, are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease.

  Susan Sontag

  Ignorance, Disease, States

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

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• In the First Amendment to the Constitution, the Founders made it clear that this was not to be a sky-god nation with a national religion like that of England, from whom we had just separated. It is curious how little understood this amendment is-yes, everyone has a right to worship any god he chooses but he does not have the right to impose his beliefs on others who do not happen to share in his superstitions and taboos.

  Gore Vidal

  Sky, Religion, Doe

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• The secret of being a writer: not to expect others to value what you've done as you value it. Not to expect anyone else to perceive in it the emotions you have invested in it. Once this is understood, all will be well.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Secret, Done, Emotion

  Joyce Carol Oates (2007). “The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982”, Ecco

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• Divinity is in its omniscience and omnipotence like a wheel, a circle, a whole, that can neither be understood, nor divided, nor begun nor ended.

  Hildegard of Bingen

  God, Omnipotence, Circles

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• Mysteries once thought to be supernatural or paranormal happenings - such as astronomical or meteorological events - are incorporated into science once their causes are understood.

  Michael Shermer

  Events, Causes, Mystery

  Michael Shermer (2011). “The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies---How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths”, p.184, Macmillan

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