Apprehend Quotes

There was with her a feeling of having descended in the social scale, with a corresponding sense of having risen in the spiritual. Every step which she took toward relieving herself from obligations added to her strength and expansion as an individual. She began to look with her own eyes; to see and to apprehend the deeper undercurrents of life. No longer was she content to "feed upon opinion" when her own soul had invited her. ~ Kate Chopin

This book first arose out of a passage in [Jorge Luis] Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought - our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography - breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a 'certain Chinese encyclopaedia' in which it is written that 'animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies'. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that. ~ Michel Foucault

If the music has a logic of its own - as I think my music has - an open-minded listener will apprehend and understand. ~ Paul Lansky

But nobody yet had been able to dig down to what was most captivating about her: this was the mysterious ability of her soul to apprehend in life only that which had once attracted and tormented her in childhood, the time when the soul's instinct is infallible; to seek out the amusing and the touching: to feel constantly an intolerable, tender pity for the creature whose life is helpless and unhappy; to feel across hundreds of miles that somewhere in Sicily a thin-legged little donkey with a shaggy belly is being brutally beaten. Whenever she did come across a creature that was being hurt, she experienced a kind of legendary eclipse - when inexplicable night comes down and ash flies and blood appears on the walls - and it seemed that if at once, at once, she did not help, did not cut short another's torture (the existence of which it was absolutely impossible to explain in a world so conducive to happiness), her heart would not stand it, and she would die. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The serial arsonist is the most difficult to apprehend because the evidence is burned up. ~ Joseph Wambaugh

To attain individual morality in an age demanding social morality, to pride one's self on the results of personal effort when the time demands social adjustment, is utterly to fail to apprehend the situation. ~ Jane Addams

So, you see, you will have to learn to listen to more of the radio music of life. It'll do you good. You are uncommonly poor in gifts, a poor blockhead, but by degrees you will come to grasp what is required of you. You have got to learn to laugh. That will be required of you. You must apprehend the humor of life, its gallows-humor. But of course you are ready for everything in the world except what will be required of you. You are ready to stab girls to death. You are ready to be executed with all solemnity. You would be ready, no doubt, to mortify and scourge yourself for centuries together. Wouldn't you? It is time to come to your senses...You are to live and to learn to laugh. You are to learn to listen to the cursed radio music of life and to reverence the spirit behind it and to laugh at its distortions. So there you are. More will not be asked of you ~ Hermann Hesse

The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves apprehend it, nothing can happen ... Perhaps it can't be done without the poet, but it certainly can't be done without the people. The poet and the people get on generally very badly, and yet they need each other. The poet knows it sooner than the people do. The people usually know it after the poet is dead; but that's all right. The point is to get your work done, and your work is to change the world. ~ James Baldwin

Each soul must awaken from the aloneness of a private dream world to greet the morning sun, view the sweet earth, apprehend the great silence, and demonstrate an appreciative thanks to everyday of life by living in a rapt state of attentive awareness. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

When we are awake we are looking through the wrong end of the telescope if transformational creativity is our goal. We take a myopic, hyperfocused, and narrow view that cannot capture the full informational cosmos on offer in the cerebrum. When awake, we see only a narrow set of all possible memory interrelationships. The opposite is true, however, when we enter the dream state and start looking through the other (correct) end of the memory-surveying telescope. Using that wide-angle dream lens, we can apprehend the full constellation of stored information and their diverse combinatorial possibilities, all in creative servitude. ~ Matthew Walker

Shall I make it clear, boys, for all to apprehend, Those that will not hear, boys, waiting for the end, Knowing it is near, boys, trying to pretend, Sitting in cold fear, boys, waiting for the end? ~ William Empson

There must be room for the imagination to exercise its powers; we must conceive and apprehend a thousand things which we do not actually witness. ~ William Godwin

If a person studies too much and exhausts his reflective powers, he will be confused, and will not be able to apprehend even that which had been within the power of his apprehension. For the powers of the body are all alike in this respect. ~ Maimonides

There must be love, and understanding, to betray. Most men haven't the wit or the honor for betrayal: not to know it when they see it; not the stomach to apprehend it as they do it. Most men, blind and dumb in their self-centeredness, don't betray: they merely disappoint. ~ Janet Morris

Use power to intelligently apprehend people who might harm you. Use that power to not be afraid. Simply step around them. ~ Frederick Lenz

I'm never more aware of the limitations of language than when I try to describe beauty. Language can create its own loveliness, of course, but it cannot deliver to us the radiance we apprehend in the world, any more than a photograph can capture the stunning swiftness of a hawk or the withering power of a supernova ... All that pictures or words can do is gesture beyond themselves toward the fleeting glory that stirs our hearts. So I keep gesturing. ~ Scott Sanders

There is but one nation on the globe from which we have anything serious to apprehend, but that is the most powerful that now exists or ever did exist. I refer to Great Britain. ~ John C. Calhoun

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway about the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved. ~ Bertrand Russell

The pope being informed of the great increase of Protestantism, in the year 1542 sent inquisitors to Venice to make an inquiry into the matter, and apprehend such as they might deem obnoxious persons. ~ John Foxe

Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation. ~ Tennessee Williams

Where the suspect poses no immediate threat to the officer and no threat to others, the harm resulting from the failing to apprehend him does not justify the use of deadly force to do so. ~ Byron White

This distinctness of things argues not a spontaneous generation but a prevenient Cause; and from that Cause we can apprehend ~ Athanasius Of Alexandria

Waiting for the end, boys, waiting for the end.
What is there to be or do?
What's become of me or you?
Are we kind or are we true?
Sitting two and two, boys, waiting for the end.

Shall I build a tower, boys, knowing it will rend
Crack upon the hour, boys, waiting for the end?
Shall I pluck a flower, boys, shall I save or spend?
All turns sour, boys, waiting for the end.

Shall I send a wire, boys? Where is there to send?
All are under fire, boys, waiting for the end.
Shall I turn a sire, boys? Shall I choose a friend?
The fat is in the pyre, boys, waiting for the end.

Shall I make it clear, boys, for all to apprehend,
Those that will not hear, boys, waiting for the end,
Knowing it is near, boys, trying to pretend,
Sitting in cold fear, boys, waiting for the end?

Shall we send a cable, boys, accurately penned,
Knowing we are able, boys, waiting for the end,
Via the Tower of Babel, boys? Christ will not ascend.
He's hiding in his stable, boys, waiting for the end.

Shall we blow a bubble, boys, glittering to distend,
Hiding from our trouble, boys, waiting for the end?
When you build on rubble, boys, Nature will append
Double and re-double, boys, waiting for the end.

Shall we make a tale, boys, that things are sure to mend,
Playing bluff and hale, boys, waiting for the end?
It will be b ~ William Empson

That justice should be administered between men, it is necessary that testimonies of fact be alleged; and that witnesses should apprehend themselves greatly obliged to discover the truth, according to their conscience, in dark and doubtful cases. ~ Isaac Barrow

But our intuitive conception of time differs from the ceaseless cosmic stream envisioned by Newton and Kant. To begin with, our experience of the present is not an infinitesimal instant. Instead it embraces some minimum duration, a moving window on life in which we apprehend not just the instantaneous "now" but a bit of the recent past and a bit of the impending future. ~ Steven Pinker

Trust me, I have not earned your dear rebuke,
I love, as you would have me, God the most;
Would lose not Him, but you, must one be lost,
Nor with Lot's wife cast back a faithless look
Unready to forego what I forsook;
This say I, having counted up the cost,
This, tho' I be the feeblest of God's host,
The sorriest sheep Christ shepherds with His crook.
Yet while I love my God the most, I deem
That I can never love you overmuch;
I love Him more, so let me love you too;
Yea, as I apprehend it, love is such
I cannot love you if I love not Him.
I cannot love Him if I love not you. ~ Christina Rossetti

Socrates is a shining example of a man who bravely lived up to his ideals, and, in the end, bravely died for them. Throughout his life, he never lost faith in the mind's ability to discern and decide, and so to apprehend and master reality. Nor did he ever betray truth and integrity for a pitiable life of self-deception and semi-consciousness. In seeking relentlessly to align mind with matter and thought with fact, he remained faithful both to himself and to the world, with the result that he is still alive in this sentence and millions of others that have been written about him. More than a great philosopher, Socrates was the living embodiment of the dream that philosophy might one day set us free. ~ Neel Burton

In the matter of fellowship God looks not at how much we apprehend of His will but rather at what our attitude towards His will is. If we honestly seek and wholeheartedly obey His desires, our fellowship remains unbroken, even though there should be many unknown sins in us. Should fellowship be determined by the holiness of God, who among all the most holy saints in the past and the present would be qualified to hold a moment's perfect communion with Him? ~ Watchman Nee

The authentic mystic wisdom ( mafrifa) is that of the soul which
knows itself as a theophany, an individual form in which are
epiphanized the divine Attributes which it would be unable to
know if it did not discover and apprehend them in itself. 'When
you have entered into my Paradise, you have entered into your-
self ( into your "soul," nafs), and you know yourself with an-
other knowledge, different from that which you had when you
knew your Lord by the knowledge you had of yourself," for
now you know Him, and it is through Him that you know
yourself. ~ Henry Corbin

As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the system of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting Changes; and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity. ~ Benjamin Franklin

You don't like my dress?"
The vines of Reed's couture streched toward the tutor, the rose's petal-mouths chomping.
It isn't that, Your Imperial Viciousness. The earthlings will not understand you. Not understanding you, they will be frightened and send their petty authorities to apprehend you."
Ha!"
Of course they'll fail. That isn't the point. But you'll have to wast engery dealing with them instead of concentrating on your niece's destruction. I doubt that the way to achive your aim is to spread your strength across many fronts so that, when it's time to battle Alyss, you many not be at the peak of your powers. Your niece, I gather, shouldn't be underestimated."
Vollrath hadn't graduated from the Tutor Corps for nothing. "I don't like when sound reasoning counters my wishes," Redd hissed. ~ Frank Beddor

As I apprehend the Buddhist doctrine of karma, I agree in principle with that. ~ William James

Beauty adds to goodness a relation to the cognitive faculty: so that "good" means that which simply pleases the appetite; while the "beautiful" is something pleasant to apprehend. ~ Thomas Aquinas

Why, I say, do so few understand and apprehend the internal power? ... He who in himself sees all things, is all things. ~ Giordano Bruno

The God of Scripture can only be known by those to whom He makes Himself known . Nor is God known by the intellect. "God is Spirit" (Joh 4:24), and therefore can only be known spiritually. But fallen man is not spiritual; he is carnal. He is dead to all that is spiritual. Unless he is born again, supernaturally brought from death unto life, miraculously translated out of darkness into light, he cannot even see the things of God (Joh 3:3), still less apprehend them (1Co 2:14). ~ Arthur W. Pink

But once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle you are equipped with the basic means of salvation. Once you know this is true, that the heart of man, his body and his brain, are forged in a white-hot furnace for the purpose of conflict (the struggle of creation) and that with the conflict removed, the man is a sword cutting daisies, that not privation but luxury is the wolf at the door and that the fangs of this wolf are all the little vanities and laxities that Success is heir to
why, then with this knowledge you are at least in a position of knowing where the danger lies. ~ Tennessee Williams

Not for the first time he was conscious of emotional lights and shades in his wife that could not be categorized, could not be named as sensuous or emotional as such, perhaps derived from each and gave to each but in essence grew out of a deeper fund of temperament that he still could not altogether apprehend. The simple miner's daughter was not simple in character at all. ~ Winston Graham

It is a travesty, in my mind, for the state and local governments on the one hand to expect the Federal government to reimburse them for costs attributable to illegal immigrants, when on the other hand the State and local governments prohibit their own law enforcement and other officials from cooperating with the Immigration and Naturalization Service to locate or apprehend or expel illegal aliens. ~ Alan K. Simpson

Anytime you can learn for yourself, experience for yourself, apprehend directly and with no intermediary, you must do so. ~ Traci L. Slatton

There was something horrifying in the realization that, in this twenty-first century of what we call 'civilization,' we have carved up what we claim is one world into 200 artificially created entities we call 'nations' and armed to apprehend or kill anyone who crosses a boundary. ~ Howard Zinn

It is worse to apprehend than to suffer. ~ Jean De La Bruyere

An infinite Power must be infinitely little as well as infinitely great. We are neither, therefore there are things too little as well as too great for us to apprehend. ~ L.M. Montgomery

She's had a long life. Now she's going to the Lord."
"Frankly it creeps me out a little when you say things like that," Simon said.
"It shouldn't. If you don't like 'Lord,' pick another word. She's going home. She's going back to the party. Whatever you like."
"I suppose you have some definite ideas about an afterlife."
"Sure. We get reabsorbed into the earthly and celestial mechanism."
"No heaven?"
"That's heaven."
"What about realms of glory? What about walking around in golden slippers?"
"We abandon consciousness as if we were waking from a bad dream. We throw it off like clothes that never fit us right. It's an ecstatic release we're physically unable to apprehend while we're in our bodies. Orgasm is our best hint, but it's crude and minor by comparison. ~ Michael Cunningham

Hello" and "good-bye" were a pair of bookends, propping up a vast library of blank volumes, void almanacs, novels full of sentiment I couldn't apprehend ~ Lauren Collins

[...] but they and I had fallen apart, as one could in England and only there, into separate worlds, little spinning planets of personal relationship; there is probably a perfect metaphor for the process to be found in physics, from the way in which, I dimly apprehend, particles of energy group and regroup themselves in separate magnetic systems; a metaphor ready to hand for the man who can speak of these things with assurance; not for me, who can only say that England abounded in these small companies of intimate friends, so that, as in this case of Julia and myself, we could live in the same street in London, see at times, a few miles distant, the rural horizon, could have a liking one for the other, a mild curiosity about the other's fortunes, a regret, even, that we should be separated, and the knowledge that either of us had only to pick up the telephone and speak by the other's pillow, enjoy the intimacies of the levee, coming in, as it were, with the morning orange juice and the sun, yet be restrained from doing so by the centripetal force of our own worlds, and the cold, interstellar space between them. ~ Evelyn Waugh

I'm profoundly attracted to classical Zen literature, I have the gall to lecture on it and the literature of Mahayana Buddhism one night a week at college, but my life itself couldn't very conceivably be less Zenful than it is, and what little I've been able to apprehend - I pick that verb with care - of the Zen experience has been a by-result of following my own rather natural path of extreme Zenlessness. Largely because Seymour himself literally begged me to do so, and I never knew him to be wrong in these matters.) Happily for me, and probably for everybody, I don't believe it's really necessary to bring Zen into this. The method of marble-shooting that Seymour, by sheer intuition, was recommending to me can be related, I'd say, legitimately and un-Easternly, to the fine art of snapping a cigarette end into a small wastebasket from across a room. An art, I believe, of which most male smokers are true masters only when either they don't care a hoot whether or not the butt goes into the basket or the room has been cleared of eyewitnesses, including, quite so to speak, the cigarette snapper himself. I'm going to try hard not to chew on that illustration, delectable as I find it, but I do think it proper to append - to revert momentarily to curb marbles - that after Seymour himself shot a marble, he would be all smiles when he heard a responsive click of glass striking glass, but it never appeared to be clear to him whose winning click it was. And it's also a fact that someone ~ J.D. Salinger

About some books we feel that our reluctance to return to them is the true measure of our admiration. It is hard to suppose that many people go back, from a spontaneous desire, to reread 1984: there is neither reason nor need to, no one forgets it. The usual distinctions between forgotten details and a vivid general impression mean nothing here, for the book is written out of one passionate breath, each word is bent to a severe discipline of meaning, everything is stripped to the bareness of terror.
Kafka's The Trial is also a book of terror, but it is a paradigm and to some extent a puzzle, so that one may lose oneself in the rhythm of the paradigm and play with the parts of the puzzle. Kafka's novel persuades us that life is inescapably hazardous and problematic, but the very 'universality' of this idea helps soften its impact: to apprehend the terrible on the plane of metaphysics is to lend it an almost soothing aura. ~ Irving Howe

The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened, is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent. A man will tell you that he has worked in a mine for forty years unhurt by an accident as a reason why he should apprehend no danger, though the roof is beginning to sink; and it is often observable, that the older a man gets, the more difficult it is to him to retain a believing conception of his own death. ~ George Eliot

He look'd a little disorder'd, when he said this, but I did not apprehend any thing from it at that time, believing as it us'd to be said, that they who do those things never talk of them; or that they who talk of such things never do them. ~ Daniel Defoe

Colour is the ultimate in art. It is still and will always remain a mystery to us, we can only apprehend it intuitively in flowers. ~ Philipp Otto Runge

Science ... means unresting endeavor and continually progressing development toward an aim which the poetic intuition may apprehend, but the intellect can never fully grasp. ~ Max Planck

[N]o clear steps have actually been taken to apprehend and prosecute those known to have been in command of the camp or the forces operating there ... The new government of Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic has pledged to act. It must now generate the political will to act. The protection of those responsible for this crime can no longer be tolerated. ~ Ben Cardin

There is no nation on earth powerful enough to accomplish our overthrow. Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter. From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence.
I must confess that I do apprehend some danger. I fear that they may place too implicit a confidence in their public servants, and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in this way they may be made the dupes of designing men, and become the instruments of their own undoing. ~ Daniel Webster

Philotheo: All of this is true, and contradicts nothing we've said, rather to the contrary we've said that there are dissimilar finite parts in one infinity, and have offered considerations how this might be true. Perhaps it might be expressed proportionately, how one might have many continuous parts which form a unity, using the example and simile of liquid mud, which, though water is contiguous with water in every part, and earth with earth, smaller than we can apprehend sensibly, these are called neither discrete nor continuous, not water nor earth, but only a continuum of mud; another might like to say that since the atoms of water are not actually continuous with one another, nor earth with earth, but perhaps water with earth and earth with water; a third might disagree with both and say only mud is continuous with mud. Following these reasons it can be stated that the infinite universe is a continuum, in which discreteness is not created by the interposition of ether between the great celestial bodies, than it would be were air to be mixed and interposed among the dry and watery particles, the difference being only in the consistency of the smallest parts of the mud, beneath the level of our sensible apprehension, or in the size, greatness, and sensibility of the parts that make up our universe: and so, contrary and diverse moving parts cooperate and compose a single immobile continuum, where contraries converge to make up a single whole, achieve single order, and becom ~ Giordano Bruno

In order that we finite beings may apprehend the Emporer He translates His glory into multiple forms - into stars, woods, waters, beasts, and the bodies of men. ~ C.S. Lewis

I thought that as I had failed in the contemplation of true existence, I ought to be careful that I did not lose the eye of my soul; as people may injure their bodily eye by observing and gazing on the sun during an eclipse, unless they take the precaution of looking at the image reflected in the water, or in some similar medium ... I was afraid that my soul might be blinded altogether if I looked at things with my eyes or tried by the help of my senses to apprehend them. And I thought that I had better had recourse to ideas, and seek in them truth in existence. I dare to say that the simile is not perfect
for I am far from admitting that he who contemplates existence through the medium of ideas, sees them only "through a glass darkly," any more than he who sees them in their working and effects. ~ Socrates

I see knowledge increasing and human power increasing. I see ever-increasing possibilities before life, And I see no limits set to it at all, Existence impresses me as a perpetual dawn. Our lives, as I apprehend, are great in expectations. ~ H.G.Wells

By looking for the unexpected and discerning the surreptitious features in the scenery within us, we apprehend our personality, find out our identity and learn how to cultivate it. Taking care of our fingerprints will be an enduring endeavor. ( "Looking for the unexpected" ) ~ Erik Pevernagie

Only those will apprehend religion who can probe its depth, who can combine intuition and love with the rigor of method ~ Abraham Joshua Heschel

The chief difficulty is that God demands of us that we live by faith: faith in God, God's sovereignty over the future, God's sufficiency for the present; while, on the other hand, the various other gods whom we can serve appeal to us in terms of the things which we can see and the forces which we can calculate. The choice between the life of faith and the life of sight is a choice between a God whom only faith can apprehend and gods whom one has only to see to understand. ~ Daniel Thambyrajah Niles

For the fear of death is indeed the pretense of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being a pretense of knowing the unknown; and no one know whether death, which men in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good. Is not this ignorance of a disgraceful sort, the ignorance which is the conceit that a man knows that he does not know? And in this respect only I believe myself to differ from men in general, and may perhaps claim to be wiser than they are: that whereas I know but little of the world below, I do not suppose that I know ... ~ Socrates

There will come a time when a person you most likely pushed out through your vagina and nursed from your
nipples, whose bottom you wiped, and whose snot and spit you cleaned up over several sleep-starved years will apprehend you with a mixture of boredom and irritation and say, 'Get a life, Mum.'
This would be a good time to remember that a) violence never solved anything; b) teenagers don't have a full brain yet – the prefrontal cortex that controls the ability to make important distinctions, like who controls the pocket money, only kicks in around the age of twenty-four; and c) you are, in fact, the adult. ~ Joanne Fedler

We like love - we love love - but perhaps its only meaning lies in its ubiquitous meaninglessness. We apprehend it, we feel it, and we think we know it, yet we cannot say what we mean by it. ~ Richard Flanagan

A man receives only what he is ready to receive, whether physically or intellectually or morally, as animals conceive at certain seasons their kind only. We hear and apprehend only what we already half know. If there is something which does not concern me, which is out of my line, which by experience or by genius my attention is not drawn to, however novel and remarkable it may be, if it is spoken, we hear it not, if it is written, we read it not, or if we read it, it does not detain us. Every man thus tracks himself through life, in all his hearing and reading and observation and traveling. His observations make a chain. The phenomenon or fact that cannot in any wise be linked with the rest which he has observed, he does not observe. By and by we may be ready to receive what we cannot receive now. I find, for example, in Aristotle some thing about the spawning, etc., of the pout and perch, because I know something about it already and have my attention aroused; but I do not discover till very late that he has made other equally important observations on the spawning of other fishes, because I am not interested in those fishes. ~ Henry David Thoreau

All these details took but a moment to apprehend yet the impression made upon Mr. Segundus by the two ladies was unusually vivid --almost supernaturally so-- like images in a delirium. A queer shock thrilled through his whole being his senses were overwhelmed and he fainted away. ~ Susanna Clarke

The aim of science is to apprehend this purely intelligible world as a thing in itself, an object which is what it is independently of all thinking, and thus antithetical to the sensible world ... The world of thought is the universal, the timeless and spaceless, the absolutely necessary, whereas the world of sense is the contingent, the changing and moving appearance which somehow indicates or symbolizes it. ~ Robin G. Collingwood

The fateful law of human semiotics is this: that of all the objects in the entire Cosmos which the sign-user can apprehend through the conjoining of signifier and signified (word uttered and thing beheld), there is one which forever escapes his comprehension
and that is the sign-user himself ... The self of the sign-user can never be grasped, because, once the self locates itself at the dead center of its world, there is no signified to which a signifier can be joined to make a sign. The self has no sign of itself. No signifier applies. All signifiers apply equally. ~ Walker Percy

George Balanchine had once remarked that 'ballet is woman.' For Balanchine, you go to a ballet for the same reason that Parmenides journeyed to the shrine of the Goddess. You go to a ballet to apprehend the event of woman as truth's disclosure. Balanchine implied that woman reveals her essence as the beautiful in the art of ballet. Truth manifests itself as the beautiful or sensuously abundant. Ballet is therefore the metaphysics of woman. Balanchine didn't put it exactly like that, but that's how Haas understood him. The woman who discloses her essence in ballet is not a human subject that is endowed with agency. Nor is she a helpless and inert object of the male gaze. She is Aletheia. Abyss. ~ Will Thorpe

The job of a teacher is to excite in the young a boundless sense of curiosity about life, so that the growing child shall come to apprehend it with an excitement tempered by awe and wonder. ~ John Garrett

I apprehend ... that the total abandonment of the principle of rotation in the offices of President and Senator will end in abuse. ~ Thomas Jefferson

They wept for humanity, those two, not for themselves. They could not bear that this should be the end. Ere silence was completed their hearts were opened, and they knew what had been important on the earth. Man, the flower of all flesh, the noblest of all creatures visible, man who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored his strength on the constellations, beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven. Century after century had he toiled, and here was his reward. Truly the garment had seemed heavenly at first, shot with colours of culture, sewn with the threads of self-denial. And heavenly it had been so long as man could shed it at will and live by the essence that is his soul, and the essence, equally divine, that is his body. The sin against the body - it was for that they wept in chief; the centuries of wrong against the muscles and the nerves, and those five portals by which we can alone apprehend - glozing it over with talk of evolution, until the body was white pap, the home of ideas as colourless, last sloshy stirrings of a spirit that had grasped the stars. ~ E.M. Forster

The finite interval 0-1 on the Number Line is thus even more inconceivably crowded. There's not only an infinite number of infinite sequences of fractions, but also an infinite number of surds, each of which is itself numerically inexpressible except as an infinite sequence of nonperiodic decimals. Let's pause to consider the vertiginous levels of abstraction involved here. If the human CPU cannot apprehend or even really conceive of (infinity)s, an infinite number of individual members of which are themselves not finitely expressible, all in an interval so finite- and innocent-looking we use it in little kids' classrooms. All of which is just resoundingly weird. ~ David Foster Wallace

For they apprehend that before them, pulled up to the fullest of her height, stands a true and haughty whore of the first water. And they cannot think what to do. ~ Imogen Hermes Gowar

Duke Hwan and the Wheelwright (an excerpt)

The world values books, and thinks that in so doing it is valuing Tao. But books contain words only. And yet there is something else which gives value to the books. Not the words only, nor the thought in the words, but something else within the thought, swinging it in a certain direction that words cannot apprehend.

But it is the words themselves that the world values when it commits them to books: and though the world values them, these words are worthless as long as that which gives them value is not held in honor.

That which man apprehends by observation is only outward form and colour, name and noise: and he thinks that this will put him in possession of Tao. Form and color, name and sound, do not reach to reality. That is why: "He who knows does not say, he who says, does not know."

How then is the world going to know Tao through words? ~ Thomas Merton

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry. ~ Gaston Bachelard

A truth is not necessary, because we negatively are not able to conceive the actual existence of the opposite thereof;but a truth is necessary when we positively are able to apprehend that the negation thereof includes an inevitable contradiction. It is not that that we can see how the opposite comes to be true, but it is that the opposite can not possibly be true. ~ Robert Lewis Dabney

The idle apprehend more things, are deeper than the industrious: no task limits their horizon; born into an eternal Sunday, they watch- - and watch themselves watching. Sloth is a somatic skepticism, the way the flesh doubts. In a world of inaction, the idle would be the only ones not to be murderers. But they do not belong to humanity, and, sweat not being their strong point, they live without suffering the consequences of Life and of Sin. Doing neither good nor evil, they disdain - spectators of the human convulsion - the weeks of time, the efforts which asphyxiate consciousness. What would they have to fear from a limitless extension of certain afternoons except the regret of having supported a crudely elementary obviousness? Then, exasperation in the truth might induce them to imitate the others and to indulge in the degrading temptation of tasks. This is the danger which threatens sloth, that miraculous residue of paradise. ~ Emil Cioran

The ordinances do not impart eternal life to the believer, but they do confirm, strengthen, and heighten our awareness and enjoyment of that life. The bread and wine are means or instruments by which God quickens us to apprehend, understand, visualize, and experience the sanctifying influence of the Holy Spirit and his unique ministry of shining the light of illumination and glory on Jesus. ~ Sam Storms

These signs are real. They are also symptoms of a process. The process follows the same form, the same structure. To apprehend it you will follow the signs. All talk of cause and effect is secular history, and secular history is a diversionary tactic. Useful to you, gentlemen, but no longer so to us here. If you want the truth - I know I presume - you must look into the technology of these matters. Even into the hearts of certain molecules - it is they after all which dictate temperatures, pressures, rates of flow, costs, profits, the shapes of towers ... '
'You must ask two questions. First, what is the real nature of synthesis? And then: what is the real nature of control? ~ Thomas Pynchon

Numa forbade the Romans to revere an image of God which had the form of man or beast. Nor was there among them in this earlier time any painted or graven likeness of Deity, 8 but while for the first hundred and seventy years they were continually building temples and establishing sacred shrines, they made no statues in bodily form for them, convinced that it was impious to liken higher things to lower, and that it was impossible to apprehend Deity except by the intellect. ~ Plutarch

In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry; and to be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful, in a word, the good which exists in the relation, subsisting, first between existence and perception, and secondly between perception and expression. Every original language near to its source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem: the copiousness of lexicography and the distinctions of grammar are the works of a later age, and are merely the catalogue and the form of the creations of poetry. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

Then he comes to the brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth. In this way the impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion: It seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself ... In truth, however, precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, i.e. his essence. Man stands so decisively in attendance on the challenging-forth of Enframing that he does not apprehend Enframing as a claim, that he fails to see himself as the one spoken to, and hence also fails in every way to hear in what respect he ek-sists, from out of his essence, in the realm of an exhortation or address, and thus can never encounter only himself. ~ Martin Heidegger

Trust is born in love, and our need is to love God, not apprehend
facts concerning him. ~ George MacDonald

Reading Aloud to My Father

I chose the book haphazard
from the shelf, but with Nabokov's first
sentence I knew it wasn't the thing
to read to a dying man:
The cradle rocks above an abyss, it began,
and common sense tells us that our existence
is but a brief crack of light
between two eternities of darkness.

The words disturbed both of us immediately,
and I stopped. With music it was the same --
Chopin's Piano Concerto - he asked me
to turn it off. He ceased eating, and drank
little, while the tumors briskly appropriated
what was left of him.

But to return to the cradle rocking. I think
Nabokov had it wrong. This is the abyss.
That's why babies howl at birth,
and why the dying so often reach
for something only they can apprehend.

At the end they don't want their hands
to be under the covers, and if you should put
your hand on theirs in a tentative gesture
of solidarity, they'll pull the hand free;
and you must honor that desire,
and let them pull it free. ~ Jane Kenyon

Now there are two kinds of hardening, one of the understanding, the other of the sense of shame, when a man is resolved not to assent to what is manifest nor to desist from contradictions. Most of us are afraid of mortification of the body, and would contrive all means to avoid such a thing, but we care not about the soul's mortification. And indeed with regard to the soul, if a man be in such a state as not to apprehend anything, or understand at all, we think that he is in a bad condition; but if the sense of shame and modesty are deadened, this we call even power (or strength). ~ Epictetus

For the rest of her life Rebecca Winter would apprehend the rumble of a truck engine in deep silence, or anything dimly like it, even the rhythmic solo roll of a kettledrum in a symphonic passage, as the soothing sound of salvation. ~ Anna Quindlen

A woman's situation, i.e those meanings derived from the total context in which she comes to maturity, disposes her to apprehend her body not as instrument of her transcendence, but an object destined for another. ~ Simone De Beauvoir

The brooks flow to their lover, the sea, and the flowers smile at the object of their passion, the light. The mist rolls down to its beloved, the valley. And I? In me is what brooks do not know, what flowers do not hear, what the mist does not apprehend. You see me alone in my love, solitary in my yearning. ~ Khalil Gibran

The doer cannot apprehend who the powers are whose emissary and acting agent he is; he must nevertheless be aware that the fullness of the world's destiny, namelessly interwoven, passes through his hands. It is said in the Mishnah, "Every man shall say: 'It is for me that the world was created.' "16 And again, "Every man shall say: 'The world rests on me,' " which is corroborated by the hasidic text: "Yes, he is the only one in the world, and its continued existence depends on his deed. ~ Martin Buber

The fact that we slowly apprehend our world, rather than suddenly discover it, should not subtract from its wonder. ~ Richard Dawkins

As we reach the crest of life and look at the path before us, we apprehend that the path no longer ascends but slopes downward toward decline and diminishment. From that point on, concerns about death are never far from mind. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

He who can be, and therefore is, another's, and he who participates in reason enough to apprehend, but not to have, is a slave by nature. ~ Aristotle.

In case you don't recognize me, I happen to be good friends with Princess Selene. I'm willing to guess you've heard of-"
"Apprehend her."
"I guess you have. ~ Marissa Meyer

It takes something of a poet to apprehend and get into the depth, the lusciousness, the spiritual life of a great poem. And so we must be in some way like God in order that we may see God as He is. ~ Edwin Hubbel Chapin

The present flowed by them like a stream. The tree rustled. It had made music before they were born, and would continue after their deaths, but its song was of the moment. The moment had passed. The tree rustled again. Their senses were sharpened, and they seemed to apprehend life. Life passed. The tree rustled again. ~ E. M. Forster

Here is the thing about God. He is so big and so perfect that we can't really understand Him. We can't possess Him, or apprehend Him. Moses learned this when he climbed up Mount Sinai and saw that the radiance of God's face would burn him up should he gaze upon it directly. But God so wants to be in relationship with us that He makes himself small, smaller than He really is, smaller and more humble than his infinite, perfect self, so that we might be able to get to Him, a little bit. ~ Lauren F. Winner

Whilst we behold unveiled the nature of Justice and Truth, we learn the difference between the absolute and the conditional or relative. We apprehend the absolute. As it were, for the first time, we exist. We become immortal, for we learn that time and space are relations of matter; that, with a perception of truth, or a virtuous will, they have no affinity. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Perhaps the Doors, Curtains, Surface Pictures, Panes of Glass, etc. are metaphors of despair, prompted by the dilemma that our sense of sight causes us to apprehend things, but at the same time restricts and partly precludes our apprehension of reality. ~ Gerhard Richter

I do not know much about Mohammed or Mohammedanism. I do not take the Koran to bed with me every night. But, if I did on some one particular night, there is one sense at least in which I know what I should not find there. I apprehend that I should not find the work abounding in strong encouragements to the worship of idols; that the praises of polytheism would not be loudly sung; that the character of Mohammed would not be subjected to anything resembling hatred and derision; and that the great modern doctrine of the unimportance of religion would not be needlessly emphasised. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

The persistence of this imagery calls to mind what Ludwik Fleck termed 'the self-contained' nature of scientific thought. As he described it, 'the interaction between what is already known, what remains to be learned, and those who are to apprehend it, go to ensure harmony within the system. But at the same time they also preserve the harmony of illusions, which is quite secure within the confines of a given thought style. ~ Emily Martin