Understood Quotes - Page 9

• I like the company of men. I've never been welcome in those groups, but then I would no more go to a consciousness-raising group and talk about my intimate life with my husband than fly to the moon. I never understood all that.

  Nancy Friday

  Husband, Moon, Men

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• The parallel between antifeminism and race prejudice is striking. The same underlying motives appear to be at work, namely fear, jealousy, feelings of insecurity, fear of economic competition, guilt feelings, and the like. Many of the leaders of the feminist movement in the nineteenth-century United States clearly understood the similarity of the motives at work in antifeminism and race discrimination and associated themselves with the anti slavery movement.

  Ashley Montagu

  Race, Racism, Feminist

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• Artists have a double relationship towards nature: they are her master and her slave at the same time. They are her slave in so far as they must work with means of this world so as to be understood; her master in so far as they subject these means to their higher goals and make them subservient to them.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Art, Nature, Mean

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• And we went our separate ways without having understood each other. As in this world nobody understands the other easily.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Understanding, World, Way

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• This idea is more surely understood by interrogation; WHAT DO I KNOW? which I bear as my motto with the emblem of a pair of scales.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Knowledge, Ideas, Pairs

  Michel de Montaigne (1946). “The essays”

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• Nietzsche, who you don't spend too much time with after the age of seventeen, did have that one great line about "he who stares into the abyss must know that the abyss also stares into him" and I never really understood that until my friend got killed and you really get your head around the idea of what horror means. It's a truly awful thing, to really, kind of have that understanding of things and when you really peer into that.

  Henry Rollins

  Mean, Ideas, Understanding

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• I always thought that "humanist" was a good word long before I understood that anyone thought it was a bad word.

  Gloria Steinem

  Long, Humanist, Bad Word

  "The Humanist Interview with Gloria Steinem" by Jennifer Bardi, thehumanist.com. August 14, 2012.

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• Women well understood how to restrict birth through timing of sexual intercourse, herbs and abortifacients. I suspect the focus on men's control of women as the means of reproduction came later, in the last five percent or so of human history, with the idea of children as property and labor. One needed to have as many as possible, never mind about women's health or mobility or brainpower. Women's freedom was restricted in order to make sure of the paternity and ownership of children.

  Gloria Steinem

  Children, Mean, Men

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• It's a weird thing to say, but it would appear to me axiomatic that if you understood fully what I was doing and appreciated it, you would like it.

  Steven Soderbergh

  Appreciated, Weird Things, Ifs

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• I think novelists, when they write their books, end up having occasionally serving a purpose and playing roles that they never really fully either intended or even understood.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• I believe that everybody needs to tell their story - to be heard, to be seen, to be acknowledged, to be understood. We all want that, deep down inside - and writing a book is a great way to make sense of your own experience and to share it with others.

  Shakti Gawain

  Believe, Book, Writing

  "Shakti Gawain Is Still ‘Living in the Light’". Interview with BJ Gallagher, www.huffingtonpost.com. September 5, 2012.

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• The Greeks understood perfectly that if there were divine beings they are capricious, unkind, malicious mostly, temperamental, envious and mostly deeply unpleasant because that you can say well yes, all right, if there is going to be god or gods then you have to admit that they're very at the very least capricious. They're certainly not consistent. They're certainly not all loving.

  Stephen Fry

  Greek, Envious, Divine

  "The Importance of Unbelief". Big Think Interview, bigthink.com. December 8, 2009.

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• Most of the problem I see amongst friends and I've experienced amongst myself is when people haven't accommodated the inequality that they want, they haven't understood that their partner wants to give more love and receive less or they haven't understood that their partner wants to receive more, but sort of give less.

  Stephen Fry

  People, Giving, Want

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com. December 8, 2009.

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• Self-esteem and identity are very fragile things. I think a lot of times, those are the motivations for why people do take their own lives - not being seen, not being recognized, not being loved, not feeling supported, not feeling understood.

  Nate Parker

  Motivation, Self Esteem, Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Reasoning is compared to understanding as movement is to rest, or acquisition to possession.... Since movement always proceeds from something immovable, and ends in something at rest, hence it is that human reasoning, in the order of inquiry and discovery, proceeds from certain things absolutely understood--namely, the first principles; and, again, in the order of judgment, returns by analysis to first principles, in the light of which it examines what it has found. Now it is clear that rest and movement are not to be referred to different powers, but to one and the same.

  Thomas Aquinas

  Light, Discovery, Order

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• Could truth perhaps be a woman who has reasons for not permitting her reasons to be seen? Could her name perhaps be--to speak Greek--Baubo?... Oh, those Greeks! They understood how to live: to do that it is necessary to stop bravely at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore the appearance, to believe in forms, in tones, in words, in the whole Olympus of appearance! Those Greeks were superficial--out of profundity!

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Truth, Believe, Names

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• Logic, too, also rests on assumptions that do not correspond to anything in the real world, e.g., on the assumption that there areequal things, that the same thing is identical at different points in time: but this science arose as a result of the opposite belief (that such things actually exist in the real world). And it is the same with mathematics, which would certainly never have arisen if it had been understood from the beginning that there is no such thing in nature as a perfectly straight line, a true circle, and absolute measure.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Real, Equality, Opposites

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• Courtship, properly understood, is the process whereby both the male and the female are brought into that state of sexual tumescence which is a more or less necessary condition for sexual intercourse. The play of courtship cannot, therefore, be considered to be definitely brought to an end by the ceremony of marriage; it may more properly be regarded as the natural preliminary to every act of coitus.

  Havelock Ellis

  Marriage, Sex, Play

  Havelock Ellis (2015). “Studies in the Psychology of Sex v3: Human Sexuality”, p.198, 谷月社

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• Reproduction is so primitive and fundamental a function of vital organisms that the mechanism by which it is assured is highly complex and not yet clearly understood. It is not necessarily connected with sex, nor is sex necessarily connected with reproduction.

  Havelock Ellis

  Sex, Fundamentals, Function

  Havelock Ellis (2013). “Psychology of Sex: The Biology of Sex—The Sexual Impulse in Youth—Sexual Deviation—The Erotic Symbolisms—Homosexuality—Marriage—The Art of Love”, p.7, Butterworth-Heinemann

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• One age cannot be completely understood if all the others are not understood. The song of history can only be sung as a whole.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Song, History, Age

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• If one were to ask. . ."What is slavery?" and I should answer in one word, "murder," my meaning would be understood at once. Why, then, to this other question: "What is property?" may I not likewise answer, "theft". . .?

  Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

  Would Be, Answers, Slavery

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• Quite generally, the familiar, just because it is familiar, is not cognitively understood. The commonest way in which we deceive either ourselves or others about understanding is by assuming something as familiar, and accepting it on that account; with all its pros and cons, such knowing never gets anywhere, and it knows not why.... The analysis of an idea, as it used to be carried out, was, in fact, nothing else than ridding it of the form in which it had become familiar.

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  Thoughtful, Thinking, Ideas

  "History teaches us that man learns nothing from history" by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, § 31, 1807.

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• As to the family, I have never understood how that fits in with the other ideals -- or, indeed, why it should be an ideal at all.

  Rose Macaulay

  Fit, Should, Ideals

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• Old-fashioned determinism was what we may call hard determinism. It did not shrink from such words as fatality, bondage of the will, necessitation, and the like. Nowadays, we have a soft determinism which abhors harsh words, and, repudiating fatality, necessity, and even predetermination, says that its real name is freedom; for freedom is only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.

  William James

  Freedom, Real, Names

  William James, Robert D Richardson (2010). “The Heart of William James”, p.23, Harvard University Press

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• I was dupedby the Secretary of the treasury [Alexander Hamilton], and made a fool for forwarding his schemes, not then sufficiently understood by me; and of all the errors of my political life, this has occasioned the deepest regret.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Regret, Errors, Political

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