Lack Of Understanding Quotes

More has been screwed up on the battlefield and misunderstood in the Pentagon because of a lack of understanding of the English language than any other single factor. ~ John W. Vessey, Jr.

There are some who come willingly," I said, as if I had not heard him, "not out of love, but out of sickness and sadness and a lack of understanding. He wanted none of them. And so he waited without waiting, and dreamed of what he could not imagine, and performed his terrible work and lived only in the moments out of which eternity is spun, knowing it was hopeless. ~ Martine Leavitt

A decorator, no matter how talented, can't always get the desired results because sometimes there is resistance or maybe a lack of understanding on the part of the client. I think it is the decorator's job to work as a guide, to bring out the best qualities and the best attitudes. ~ Albert Hadley

This perversion of the truth, familiar to the artist though it was, always unnerved him afresh and proved too much for him. What was a consequence of the premature ending of his fast was here presented as the cause of it! To fight against this lack of understanding, against a whole world of nonunderstanding, was impossible. ~ Franz Kafka

I feel like Amy wanted people to believe she really was perfect. And as we got to be friends, I got to know her. And she wasn't perfect. You know? She was brilliant and charming and all that, but she was also controlling and OCD and a drama queen and a bit of a liar. Which was fine by me. It just wasn't fine by her. She got rid of me because I knew she wasn't perfect. ~ Gillian Flynn

Under Small's influence Jefferson came to share Immanuel Kant's 1784 definition of the spirit of the era: "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity," Kant wrote.21 "Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. ~ Jon Meacham

Call me a pessimist, but I think if bigotry could be solved by access to more information, it would have been solved by now. Hate isn't about lack of understanding: it's about hate. ~ Hank Green

Why is it that you guys are so conservative in your views, in the face of the almost complete lack of understanding of what is going on in your field?" I asked. The answer was as simple as it was surprising. "If we [cosmologists] don't accept some common picture of the universe, however unsupported by the facts, there would be nothing to bind us together as a scientific community. Since it is unlikely that any picture that we use will be falsified in our lifetime, one theory is as good as any other." The explanation was social, not scientific. ~ Per Bak

The lack of understanding of something is not evidence for God. It's evidence of a lack of understanding. ~ Lawrence M. Krauss

In a way, the world−view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird. ~ George Orwell

The secularizing 'values' and events that have been predicted would happen in the Muslim world have now begun to unfold with increasing momentum and persistence due still to the Muslims' lack of understanding of the true nature and implications of secularization as a philosophical program. ~ Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas

When people come into the office and say they've tried to make their marriage work, and I hear what the effort was, it seems to me that there's some lack of understanding of what effort is. ~ Peter D. Kramer

We have reached a point today where labor-saving devices are good only when they do not throw the worker out of his job. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

There is no such thing as crazy, only the lack of understanding between normals and abnormals. ~ J.K. Brown

You get more churches burned down in the United States in the last two years than in the last hundred, because of the lack of understanding of culture and diversity and the beauty of it. ~ Edward James Olmos

The lack of understanding does not hurt, as much as the lack of effort to understand does ! ~ Wordions

Vladimir: I don't understand.
Estragon: Use your intelligence, can't you?
Vladimir uses his intelligence.
Vladimir: (finally) I remain in the dark. ~ Samuel Beckett

Loneliness isn't a lack of people. It is a lack of understanding and acceptance. ~ Bronnie Ware

I do not know which impulse was stronger in me when I began to think: the original thirst for knowledge or the urge to communicate with man. Knowledge attains its full meaning only through the bond that unites men; however, the urge to achieve agreement with another human being was so hard to satisfy. I was shocked by the lack of understanding, paralyzed, as it were, by every reconciliation in which what had gone before was not fully cleared up. Early in my life and then later again and again I was perplexed by people's rigid inaccessibility and their failure to listen to reasons, their disregard of facts, their indifference which prohibited discussion, their defensive attitude which kept you at a distance and at the decisive moment buried any possibility of a close approach, and finally their shamelessness, that bares its own soul without reserve, as though no one were present. When ready assent occurred I remained unsatisfied, because it was not based on true insight but on yielding to persuasion; because it was the consequence of friendly cooperation, not a meeting of two selves. True, I knew the glory of friendship (in common studies, in the cordial atmosphere of home or countryside). But then came the moments of strangeness, as if human beings lived in different worlds. Steadily the consciousness of loneliness grew upon me in my youth, yet nothing seemed more pernicious to me than loneliness, especially the loneliness in the midst of social intercourse that deceives itse ~ Karl Jaspers

The more they talked and argued, the less they understood each other. In the end they fell silent, full of mutual contempt and hatred. And in this silence of the dumb and these speeches of the blind, in this medley of people bound together by the same grief, terror and hope, in this hatred and lack of understanding between men who spoke the same tongue, you could see much of the tragedy of the twentieth century. ~ Vasily Grossman

I could never put my finger on her realness. She was so pretty and so quick that even when she had just awakened, her eyes full of sleep and hair tousled, I thought she looked just like the Virgin Mary. But what mother and daughter understand each other, or even have the sympathy for each other's lack of understanding? Mother ~ Maya Angelou

He realized how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant. In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding, they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm because it left no residue behind. ~ George Orwell

Rapid population growth and technological innovation, combined with our lack of understanding about how the natural systems of which we are a part work, have created a mess. ~ David Suzuki

Professional opinion is skeptical about anything that doesn't fit in with the version of reality it has been programmed to believe in. The skepticism comes from a lack of understanding and the need to defend the status quo and not from actual knowledge of the subject. ~ David Icke

Tom Paine has almost no influence on present-day thinking in the United States because he is unknown to the average citizen. Perhaps I might say right here that this is a national loss and a deplorable lack of understanding concerning the man who first proposed and first wrote those impressive words, 'the United States of America.'

But it is hardly strange.

Paine's teachings have been debarred from schools everywhere and his views of life misrepresented until his memory is hidden in shadows, or he is looked upon as of unsound mind.

We never had a sounder intelligence in this Republic. He was the equal of Washington in making American liberty possible. Where Washington performed Paine devised and wrote. The deeds of one in the Weld were matched by the deeds of the other with his pen.

Washington himself appreciated Paine at his true worth. Franklin knew him for a great patriot and clear thinker. He was a friend and confidant of Jefferson, and the two must often have debated the academic and practical phases of liberty.

I consider Paine our greatest political thinker. As we have not advanced, and perhaps never shall advance, beyond the Declaration and Constitution, so Paine has had no successors who extended his principles. Although the present generation knows little of Paine's writings, and although he has almost no influence upon contemporary thought, Americans of the future will justly appraise his work. I am certain of ~ Thomas A. Edison

The failure of modern evangelicalism is the failure to understand the holiness of God. ~ R.C. Sproul

The root of all evil is lack of understanding of what is right. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

It has been said that, in scale, a human being is about halfway between an atom and a star. Interestingly, this is also the regime in which physics becomes most complicated; on the atomic scale, we have quantum mechanics, on the large scale, relativity. It is in between these two extremes where our lack of understanding of how to combine these theories becomes apparent.

The Oxford scientist Roger Penrose has written convincingly of his belief that whatever it is that we are missing from our understanding of fundamental physics is also missing from our understanding of consciousness. These ideas are important when one considers what have become known as anthropic points of view, best summarized as the belief that the Universe must be the way it is in order to allow us to be here to observe it. ~ Brian May

To understand something sufficiently well to be able to program it for a computer does not mean to understand it to its ultimate depth. There can be no such ultimate understanding in practical affairs. Programming is rather a test of understanding. In this respect it is like writing; often when we think we understand something and attempt to write about it, our very act of composition reveals our lack of understanding even to ourselves. Our pen writes the word 'because' and suddenly stops. We thought we understood the 'why' of something, but discover that we don't. We begin a sentence with 'obviously,' and then see that what we meant to write is not obvious at all. Sometimes we connect two clauses with the word 'therefore,' only to then see that our chain of reasoning is defective. Programming is like that. It is, after all, writing, too. But in ordinary writing we sometimes obscure our lack of understanding, our failures in logic, by unwittingly appealing to the immense flexibility of a natural language and to its inherent ambiguity... An interpreter of of programming-language-texts, a computer, is immune to the seductive influence of mere eloquence... A computer is a merciless critic. ~ Joseph Weizenbaum

Miss Featherington!' Lady D boomed. 'You haven't told me who you suspect.'
'No, Penelope,' Colin said, a rather smirky smile on his face, 'you haven't.'
Penelope's first instinct was to mumble something under her breath and hope that Lady Danbury's age had left her hard enough of hearing that she would assume that any lack of understanding was the fault of her own ears and not Penelope's lips. But even without glancing to her side, she could feel Colin's presence, sense his quirky, cocky grin egging her on, and she found herself standing a little straighter, with her chin perched just a little higher than usual.
He made her more confident, more daring. He made her more ... herself. Or at least the herself she wished she could be. ~ Julia Quinn

Honestly, if I can't clearly understand the workings of a young innocent girl, like Ami, then how can I ever possibly expect to understand any other women? That chiefly was what was on my mind at that moment. Seriously, why should things which should be simple, like relationships between two people, be so complicated? Still, it doesn't matter if we go a bit wrong, because every time we go wrong in any relationship, if we care, we will always go in search of the solutions. ~ Andrew James Pritchard

I would imagine Malcolm, his body bound in a cell, studying the books, trading his human eyes for the power of flight. And I too felt bound by my ignorance, by the questions that I had not yet understood to be more than just means, by my lack of understanding ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

It is all too often the case with certain types of scholars of Malay-Indonesian Islam, when dealing with Islamic texts such as the one in question in which they are confronted with a word they do not quite understand, that instead of admitting their failure to explain the word in the text as due to their own lack of understanding, they would proceed to conjure up some excuse for branding the word as an enigma, and then, because it is an enigma to them, they would proceed further to reject it with such pronouncements as: "it seems obvious that this puzzling word is due to a scribal error", so that they might suggest their own futile substitute. ~ Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas

Fear is based on ignorance. Lack of understanding is also a primary cause of anger. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

How was your day?" he asked.
I faltered, unaccustomed to the question. The look on my face must have been strange because he laughed at me and said, "Okay… don't tell me then."
Considering the question I asked, "Do people normally want a real answer to that?"
I'd only been asked for reports by my father or his team.
Julian thought for a moment and shrugged, "I suppose not. Most people say 'good' or 'fine' even when they don't mean it."
He mistook my question for simple speculation instead of a lack of understanding. Nodding I snickered and said, "Then it was fine. Yours?"
He grinned, "Good. ~ Kay Harding

You really don't understand what it's like to have bad parents, do you? ~ Sandra Newman

The mind can fool the heart, as the heart can fool the mind. ~ Anthony Liccione

I'm really tired", you come to understand, is meaningless, giving the impression all will be well with a good rest and that if you've ever been tired, you know what it is to be exhausted. ~ Frances Ryan

It means that each factory will be making Robots of a different color, a different nationality, a different tongue; they'll all be different---as different from one another as fingerprints; they'll no longer be able to conspire with one another; and we---we people will help to foster their prejudices and cultivate their mutual lack of understanding, you see? So that any given Robot, to the day of its death, right to the grave, will forever hate a Robot bearing the trademark of another factory. ~ Karel Capek

Modern man has made no significant leaps in the evolution of consciousness for thousands of years. In fact, we may even be less intelligent than some of the civilizations that have preceded us. Scientists have speculated that the gap of intelligence between great thinkers such as Einstein and Tesla compared to the average human is far greater than the gap between the average human and contemporary apes. What is it that is blocking us from achieving a superior level of intelligence?
Aside from the mental conditioning that our culture has been subjected to, I believe that it is due to an utter lack of understanding human nature. Modern humans are raised in such a negative environment. The corruption of our educational system, economic structure, and media outlets has resulted in a state of ignorance common amongst most individuals. ~ Joseph P. Kauffman

Yes, there are many ways to collect content, but in my experience - the best and most authentic content is one which you speak when you are in moments of flow. You can use any recording device. Do not let the lack of understanding technology slow you down. Ask someone how to turn the damn thing on and record yourself. Remember, you are on a mission to complete the levels within and win a better life for yourself and your family. You owe it to them to overcome these obstacles and to see your way through, not to create excuses. ~ Kytka Hilmar-Jezek

I feel like Africans are too often portrayed as people on the National Geographic channel: the image is of an African man in a loincloth chasing a gazelle. It's not intentionally racist; I wouldn't call it racist at all. It's a lack of understanding another culture. ~ Djimon Hounsou

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. ... 1 Nothing is required for this enlightenment ... except freedom; and the freedom in question is the least harmful of all, namely, the freedom to use reason publicly in all matters. - IMMANUEL KANT, What Is Enlightenment? ~ Jon Meacham

The idea that computers can ever replace teachers and schools reveals a deep lack of understanding about the role leadership plays in student success. ~ Wendy Kopp

Lack of understanding, along with outright anti-Christian prejudice, leads to journalistic amazement or horror at the supposed self-deception of those who do see a spiritual realm. ~ Marvin Olasky

Mutual lack of understanding carries the threat of imminent and violent destruction. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Perhaps there's some truth to the idea that the real danger of blood magic isn't that it draws the power from sacrifice, or that it tempts the greedy and ambitious into using the suffering of others to fuel their spells. Perhaps the danger is simply that we do not understand it, and that lack of understanding invites disaster even when our intentions are pure. ~ Liane Merciel

Misunderstanding of divine truths or lack of understanding are the only things that may
prevent a man from becoming God's representative on earth ~ Sunday Adelaja

But now more often the old stale hopeless weariness overcame him: the black sickness which almost no one else, certainly not his nearest dearest friends, could understand at all. The idea of giving up the world, which had given him for a time so much life-energy, appeared now as a sort of fake suicide, a ghastly play-image of his death. This fatal falseness-of-heart was what perhaps Father Damien, on further acquaintance, had now seen in him. ~ Iris Murdoch

We fear only what we haven't understood. ~ Byron Katie

The tendency of philosophers who know nothing of machinery is to talk of man as a mere mechanism, intending by this to imply that he is without purpose. This shows a lack of understanding of machines as well as of man. ~ Arthur Young

It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences. ~ Audre Lorde

All attributes of the relative self (prakrut) in the world have arisen due to lack of understanding. All this has arisen due to not understanding the truth. One has been wandering around for countless lives and still one considers oneself so great! ~ Dada Bhagwan

We fail to take responsibility, to act productively in the interest of ourselves and others. And in our attempts at a better life, we are often severely limited or thwarted by the immature and socially inept behavior of ourselves and others. There is a great fabric of relations, behaviors and emotions, reverberating with human and animal bliss and suffering, a web of intimate and formal relations, both direct and indirect. Nasty whirlwinds of feedback cycles blow through this great multidimensional web, pulsating with hurt and degradation. My lacking human development blocks your possible human development. My lack of understanding of you, your needs perspectives, hurts you in a million subtle ways. I become a bad lover, a bad colleague, a bad fellow citizen and human being. We are interconnected: You cannot get away from my hurt and wounds. They will follow you all of your life - I will be your daughter's abusive boyfriend, your belligerent neighbor from hell. And you will never grow wings because there will always be mean bosses, misunderstanding families and envious friends. And you will tell yourself that is how life must be. But it is not how life has to be. Once you begin to be able to see the social-psychological fabric of everyday life, it becomes increasingly apparent that the fabric is relatively easy to change, to develop. Metamodern politics aims to make everyone secure at the deepest psychological level, so that we can live authentically; a byproduct of which is ~ Hanzi Freinacht

We are usually undone by our lack of understanding of ourselves. ~ Julian Fellowes

My theory is that humans aren't really bad; we all do bad things, but being bad is not our natural state. You're acting out of fear, lack of understanding, compassion, but essentially communication. Human beings are made of love, an overwhelming desire to love. When we communicate, we exist in our natural state. ~ Seal

In ability choice education finance majorities people understanding voting A lot of voters always cast their ballot for the candidate who seems to them to be one of the people. That means he must have the same superstitions, the same unbalanced prejudices, and the same lack of understanding of public finances that are characteristic of the majority. A better choice would be a candidate who has a closer understanding and a better education than the majority. Too much voting is based on affability rather than on ability. ~ William Feather

Paine suffered then, as now he suffers not so much because of what he wrote as from the misinterpretations of others...

He disbelieved the ancient myths and miracles taught by established creeds. But the attacks on those creeds - or on persons devoted to them - have served to darken his memory, casting a shadow across the closing years of his life.

When Theodore Roosevelt termed Tom Paine a 'dirty little atheist' he surely spoke from lack of understanding. It was a stricture, an inaccurate charge of the sort that has dimmed the greatness of this eminent American. But the true measure of his stature will yet be appreciated. The torch which he handed on will not be extinguished. If Paine had ceased his writings with 'The Rights of Man' he would have been hailed today as one of the two or three outstanding figures of the Revolution. But 'The Age of Reason' cost him glory at the hands of his countrymen - a greater loss to them than to Tom Paine.

I was always interested in Paine the inventor. He conceived and designed the iron bridge and the hollow candle; the principle of the modern central draught burner. The man had a sort of universal genius. He was interested in a diversity of things; but his special creed, his first thought, was liberty.

Traducers have said that he spent his last days drinking in pothouses. They have pictured him as a wicked old man coming to a sorry end. But I am persuaded that Paine must have looked with magnanim ~ Thomas A. Edison

If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don't understand the problems and you don't understand the technology. ~ Bruce Schneier

One thing that I feel very, very strongly is that we talk about Islamic countries, Islamic people, Islamic leaders, as either moderates or extremists. It's almost like there are only two categories of Muslims. And actually, that doesn't show respect. It shows lack of understanding of the diversity of Muslim thought. ~ David Miliband

It's not that humans and non-humans are identical ... but the lack of understanding that led to the slave trade is the same lack of understanding many people have about animals today. When slaves were brought over from Africa, many people believed they were not humans, that they didn't have feelings. Many people believe that primates and other animals don't have feelings, too, but they do. ~ Jane Goodall

Areas where there is a lack of data, or a lack of understanding, are automatically assumed to belong, by default, to God. ~ Richard Dawkins

Now with the allocation and the understanding of the lack of understanding, we enter into a new era of science in which we feel nothing more than so much so as to say that those within themselves, comporary or non-comporary, will figuratively figure into the folding of our non-understanding and our partial understanding to the networks of which we all draw our source and conclusions from. ~ Reggie Watts

Children perceive frightening ghosts and monsters and dragons and they are terrified. Yet if they ask someone they trust for the meaning of what they perceive, and are willing to let their own interpretations go in favor of reality, their fear goes with them. When a child is helped to translate his 'ghosts' into a courtain, his 'monster' into a shadow and his 'dragon' into a dream he is no longer afraid, and laughs happily at his own fear.
You, my child, are afraid of your brothers and of your Father and of yourself. But you are merely deceived in them. Ask what they are of the Teacher of reality, and hearing His answer, you too will laugh at your fears and replace them with peace. For fear lies not in reality, but in the minds of children who do not understand reality. It is only their lack of understanding that frightens them, and when they learn to perceive truly they are not afraid. ~ Foundation For Inner Peace

Whatever one does in this world, he does it out of compulsion; so it is indeed our lack of understanding when we scold someone for what they do. If you scold him, he will do it even more. (Instead) You should explain to him with love. All diseases will disappear with love. You will get pure love either from the Gnani Purush [the enlightened one] or his followers! ~ Dada Bhagwan

She live in a mindset that I could never move to ~ Drake

I sighed, he sighed, the wind and flowers sighed too. I think those marble statues sighed along as well, in their lack of understanding the human condition ~ V.C. Andrews

Couldn't you have lied about something else?"
OWEN gave me a long, blank look, as if by asking this question I had betrayed a fundamental lack of understanding with respect to the intensity of his hangover. ~ Seth Fried

Still there are people who grasp freedom at once, who don't doubt, don't hesitate - but accept themselves as the measure of themselves and of everything, and who don't seem to show any dread. In some cases there are people who have the strength to do it and the innate wisdom to understand what the price is. In other cases they are people who have no idea what they're doing, who choose freedom out of ignorance and lack of understanding - they know nothing about any price, and they go under when the price is demanded. It means ruin to choose to think for oneself if one can't think. ~ Jens Bjorneboe

Foolish people laugh at things they do not understand, producing the sound of braying donkeys. ~ Wayne Gerard Trotman

A man who lacks understanding is susceptible to deception ~ Sunday Adelaja

Fear only exists when you do not understand that you have the power to project thought and that the Universe will respond. ~ Esther Hicks

I am a man that knows of the possibility of failure. I have suffered defeat. I have created miscalculations. I have even abandoned victory, and fallen in shame. I can claim my arrogance. I can claim my ignorance. I can claim my naiveté. However, the creation of those possibilities were simply due to a lack of understanding of who I was. I have conquered my Id. I have conquered my Ego. I have conquered my Spirituality. I am a man that knows of the possibility of failure, but because I have mastered the principles of nothing, possibility, and uncertainty, failure simply tags along with me, unable to grasp my glory. ~ Lionel Suggs

What worries me is the acceptance of the importance of feelings without any effort to understand their complex biological and sociocultural machinery. The best example of this attitude can be found in the attempt to explain bruised feelings or irrational behavior by appealing to surface social causes or the action of neurotransmitters, two explanations that pervade the social discourse as presented in the visual and printed media; and in the attempt to correct personal and social problems with medical and nonmedical drugs. It is precisely this lack of understanding of the nature of feelings and reason (one of the hallmarks of the "culture of complaint") that is cause for alarm. ~ Antonio R Damasio

The new atheists show a disturbing lack of understanding of or concern about the complexity and ambiguity of modern experience, and their polemic entirely fails to mention the concern for justice and compassion that, despite their undeniable failings, has been espoused by all three of the monotheisms.

Religious fundamentalists also develop an exagerrated view of their enemy as the epitome of evil. This tendency makes critique of the new atheists too easy. They never discuss the work of such theologians as Bultmann or Tillich, who offer a very different view of religion and are closer to mainstream tradition than any fundamentalist. Unlike Feurerbach, Marx and Freud, the new atheists are not theologically literate. As one of their critics has remarked, in any military strategy it is essential to confront the enemy at its strongest point; failure to do so means that their polemic remains shallow and lacks intellectual depth. It is also morally and intellectually conservative. Unlike Feurerback, Marx, Ingersoll or Mill, these new Atheists show little concern about the poverty, injustice and humiliation that has inspired many of the atrocities they deplore; they show no yearning for a better world. Nor, like Nietzsche , Sartre or Camus, do they compel their readers to face up to the pointlessness and futility that ensue when people lack the resources to create a sense of meaning. They do not appear to consider the effect of such nihilism on people who do not have priv ~ Karen Armstrong

When lust combines with love, feelings like dissatisfaction,lack of trust,lack of understanding,jealousy and possessiveness are produced ~ Nirja

Birds scream at the top of their lungs in horrified hellish rage every morning at daybreak to warn us all of the truth, but sadly we don't speak bird. ~ Kurt Cobain

The Tragedy isn't Autism - The Tragedy is the lack of understanding of Autism, Lack of resources, Interventions not being met with the person in mind and Assumptions being made about the person. ~ Paul Isaacs

Collage is more than just an art style. Collage is all about bringing different elements together. Once you form a sensibility about connection, how different elements relate to each other, you deepen your understanding of yourself and others. ~ Bryan Collier

Jamie came back to the apartment one night to find her spreading a viscous fluid onto a canvas. It was threaded wtih blood. "Good God," he said. "What the hell is that?"
Pia didn't bother to look up but continued to knead the clear slime across the canvas. "It's my new piece."
"But what is it?" He kept pointing. He'd never seen something so disgusting in his life. And her hands were completely in it.
"It's Jodie's placenta. She gave it to me. I'm going to tack it up and let it dry on this canvas. Then I'm gonna glue-gun pictures of dead fetuses onto Lucite and make them the centerpeice."
"Uh huh."
She raised her sticky hands to him. "It's about women, you know? The way that the world opresses them, all right? And it's about babies, and . . . I don't know . . . I just got the placenta today."
"Wow, that's wow . . . that's . . ." No words for this. He scratched his chin as she spread her hands in a concentric motion across the canvas. "So, do you really think anyone's gonna want to put that up on their wall when it's done?" he asked.
She scowled, displeased. ~ K. Stephens

The most devout among us become atheistic in this connection; we do not believe God, we enthrone common sense and tack the name of God on to it. We do lean to our own understanding, instead of trusting God with all our hearts. ~ Oswald Chambers

We are all part of a loving gestation process. We are here to empower each other to face the journey through unconditional love. This voyage involves stopping over in conditioned configurations, such as our physical reality. Yet, these are all provisional abodes, and every step through this voyage entails becoming more whole, retrieving further pieces of the soul. All human sufferance derives from lack of awareness of this process.

Read on at: //www.facebook.com/notes/astroshamanism... ~ Franco Santoro

Of amazing intelligence, they learn quickly and remember easily with few repetitions. There is often an uncanny understanding of what is wanted and needed of them at any given time. Bred to love people, they bond very tightly to their owners.24 Instead ~ Frans De Waal

The Senegalese conservationist Baba Dioum can summarize: "In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught." ~ Ursula Goodenough

And writing comedy and it really taught me how to kind of like craft jokes, it sounds like weird but really focus on crafting jokes and trying to make the writing really sharp. At the same time I did improv comedy in college, and that helped with understanding the performance aspect of comedy, you know, because it's different when you improv something vs. when you write it and they're both kind of part of my process now. ~ Nicholas Stoller

Though violent action is sometimes associated with nihilism, what makes such activity nihilistic, it seems, is the belief that ultimately nothing will come out of it. When nihlists throw themselves into activity it is with the understanding that its only goal is the expression and dissipation of their life's energy. Any creative product will eventually be consumed by decay. Since there is nothing that humans can do to mend the separation between themselves and reality, they can never actualize their supreme standards of worth and value. This world must remain substandard no matter what we do to try and change the situation. ~ John Marmysz

I'll never marry. No man could want me in battle, and I wouldn't want anyone who might keep me away from my duty."
"Don't be so hasty to rule out gentlemen's understanding," Magnus said. "There are some who admire a capable girl. One of them might be closer than you think, if you'd take the time to notice what's before you." He leaned closer. For a second, I didn't dare breathe. Since our moment in the library, Magnus had returned to his old, harmless flirtation. I'd half hoped it would stay that way. He sighed gently and said, "Can't you see the way Palehook looks at you?"
He laughed. I was so relieved that I joined him. ~ Jessica Cluess

One with higher 'revolutions' of intellect has a higher power of understanding. He will understand before explanation becomes necessary. Laborers do not have even five 'revolutions' per minute and an intellectual has one to two thousand 'revolutions' per minute. The higher the 'revolutions, the quicker he will understand this 'Science' [Akram Vignan]. ~ Dada Bhagwan

Schartz would never live in a world so open. His would always be occluded by the fact that his understanding and his ambition outstripped his talent. He'd never be as good as he wanted to be, not at baseball, not at football, not at reading Greek or taking the LSAT. And beyond all that he'd never be as _good_ as he wanted to be. He'd never found anything inside himself that was really good and pure, that wasn't double-edged, that couldn't just as easily become its opposite. He had tried and failed to find that thing and he would continue to try and fail, or else he would leave off trying and keep on failing. He had no art to call his own. He knew how to motivate people, manipulate people, move them around, this was his only skill. He was like a minor Greek god you've barely heard of, who sees through the glamour of the armor and down into the petty complexity of each soldier's soul. And in the end is powerless to bring about anything resembling his vision. The loftier, arbitrary gods intervene. ~ Chad Harbach

The art of reading is in great part that of acquiring a better understanding of life from one's encounter with it in a book. ~ Andre Maurois

The powerful though vague and unsubstantiated presumption is that something has been found out that renders a spiritual understanding of reality in the manner of Jesus simply foolish to those who are "in the know." But when it comes time to say exactly what it is that has been found out, nothing of substance is forthcoming. ~ Dallas Willard

Any 'artist' makes a living by expressing what others can't - because they're unaware of their feelings, they're too afraid to express those feelings, or they lack the skills to communicate and be understood. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Sometimes the fresh load of guests would turn up before we had got rid of the previous group, and the chaos was indescribable; the house and garden would be dotted with poets, authors, artists, and playwrights arguing, painting, drinking, typing, and composing. Far from being the ordinary, charming people that Larry had promised, they all turned out to be the most extraordinary eccentrics who were so highbrow that they had difficulty in understanding one another. ~ Gerald Durrell

The Mercy Band," which is guiding this work, endeavoring to bring humanity to a realization of the simplicity of the transition called death, and the importance of a rational understanding of what becomes of the spirits. ~ Carl A. Wickland

The truth is that the masses grew out of the fragments of a highly atomized society whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual had been held in check only through membership in a class. The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships. Coming from the class-ridden society of the nation-state, whose cracks had been cemented with nationalistic sentiment, it is only natural that these masses, in the first helplessness of their new experience, have tended toward an especially violent nationalism, to which mass leaders have yielded against their own instincts and purposes for purely demagogic reasons. ~ Hannah Arendt

For decades, the plight of the Palestinian people has been exacerbated by internal corruption, a lack of effective investment, and the political cynicism of the Arab states, who often did not have the best interests of the Palestinians at heart. ~ Edgar Bronfman, Sr.

I must admit to a personal lack of sympathy with women who have themselves photographed in black stockings, garter belts and boots, with bare breasts, bananas, and coy, come-hither glances ... A woman using her own face and body has a right to do what she will with them, but it is a subtle abyss that separates men's use of women for sexual titillation from women's use of women to expose that insult. ~ Lucy R. Lippard

After learning , please be realistic.
Give yourself a permission to keep making mistakes.
We must also give ourselves the gift of understanding that we can't remember everything we learned at once ~ John Gray

The problem with a person with a lack of love is that they don't know what it looks like. So it's easy for them to get tricked, to see things that aren't there. But then I guess we all lie to ourselves all the time. ~ Charles Forsman

Understanding the materials I work with ... gives me a deeper understanding of my place. And it's helped me make sense of the changes that are happening to me as I grow older. ~ Andy Goldsworthy