Understandings Quotes

I recognize thart even you, yourself, will change. Your ideals will change, your tastes will change, your desires will change. Your whole understandings of who you are had better change, because if it doesn't change, you've become a very static personality over a great many years, and nothing would displease me more. And so I recognize that the process of evolution will produce changes in you. ~ Neale Donald Walsch

The smallest thing by the influence of eternity is made infinite and eternal. We pass through a standing continent or region of ages, that are already ebfore us, glorious and perfect while we come to them. Like men in a ship we pass forward, the shores and marks seeming to go backward, though we move and they stand still. We are not with them in our progressive motion, but prevent the swiftness of our course, and are present with them in our understandings. Like the sun we dart our rays before us, and occupy those spaces with light and contemplation which we move towards, but possess not with our bodies. And seeing all things in the light of Divine knowledge, eternally serving God, rejoice unspeakable in that service, and enjoy it all. ~ Thomas Traherne

The reason that I have concentrated on non-computability, in my arguments, rather than on complexity, is simply that it is only with the former that I have been able to see how to make the necessary strong statements. It may well be that in the working lives of most mathematicians, non-computability issues play, if anything, only a very small part. But that is not the point at issue. I am trying to show that (mathematical) understanding is something that lies beyond computation, and the Godel (-Turing) argument is one of the few handles that we have on that issue. It is quite probable that our mathematical insights and understandings are often used to achieve things that could in principle also be achieved computationally-but where blind computation without much insight may turn out to be so inefficient that it is unworkable (cf. 3.26). However, these matters are much more difficult to address than the non-computability issue. ~ Roger Penrose

The imagination has a power to see into things, to feel into things, to be at one with things anew, so as to produce a new understanding of the object of the imagination.1 Indeed, those sensations and understandings that the imagination can furnish may be so detailed and vivid and complex that we simply lack the words adequately to capture them. In those circumstances, we may 'begin to realize what a huge gap there is between our understanding of what happens around us and inside us, and the words we have at our command to say something about it' (119). ~ Ronald Barnett

While binge drinking is a significant issue, it is likely that many members of the public would be surprised by its categorisation as a mental illness, particularly at the milder end."

Public confusion caused by differing understandings of the term 'mental illness'.
Jorm AF, Reavley NJ.
Aust N Z J Psychiatry. 2012 May;46(5):397-9.
PMID: 22535288 ~ Anthony F. Jorm

We must believe that He permits it [this war] for some wise purpose of his own, mysterious and unknown to us; and though with ourlimited understandings we may not be able to comprehend it, yet we cannot but believe, that he who made the world still governs it. ~ Abraham Lincoln

They that never peeped beyond the common belief in which their easy understandings were at first indoctrinated are strongly assured of the truth of their receptions. ~ Joseph Glanvill

Different people have such different understandings of the connection (or lack of connection) between life on- and off-line ~ Anonymous

Why, then, does this burning zeal for God, for the Church, and for the salvation of souls - burning I say, literally, with fire and faggot - pass by those moral vices and wickednesses, without any chastisement, which are acknowledged by all men to be diametrically opposite to the profession of Christianity, and bend all its nerves either to the introducing of ceremonies, or to the establishment of opinions, which for the most part are about nice and intricate matters, that exceed the capacity of ordinary understandings? ~ John Locke

I am very happy here [on Cuba], but I feel I have work to do in the United States. It's where I can identify with the total world struggle for socialism. But I think as a North American, as a Black North American, I have certain understandings - certain contributions - to make that are unique to the North Amerian experience. ~ Huey Newton

Teachers influence the problems that are posed through engaging students with specific materials and experiences as well as by determining the understandings at the center of a particular unit of inquiry. Teachers, however, negotiate the curriculum with students, not just build curriculum from students, so that investigations grow out of process. Guided inquiry, where the teacher is the problem-poser and students are problem-solvers, is often found in skill instruction. For example, teachers may use assessment to determine students' needs as readers and ~ Simon Davidson

It is always wise, particularly in the beginning, to balance your new intuitive and psychic understandings with good old common sense. A good psychic perception follows your common sense. ~ Frederick Lenz

We must not define Jesus and his kingdom by fitting them within conventional understandings of kings and kingdoms. Rather, we must judge and deconstruct those conventional definitions in light of Jesus and his example. ~ Brian D. McLaren

Where will Christian feminists go for spiritual nourishment if the church itself fails to reflect the feminism of Jesus? If tradition becomes a reason for churches, for synagogues, for mosques to refuse to change in the light of new insights and understandings, on what grounds can we expect change from other institutions? ~ Joan D. Chittister

Individualism is a modest and still unconscious form of will to power; with it a single human unit seems to think it sufficient to free himself from the preponderating power of society (or of the State or Church). He does not set himself up in opposition as a personality, but merely as a unit; he represents the rights of all other individuals as against the whole. That is to say, he instinctively places himself on a level with every other unit: what he combats he does not combat as a person, but as a representative of units against a mass. [...] When one has reached a certain degree of independence, one always longs for more: separation in proportion to the degree of force; the individual is no longer content to regard himself as equal to everybody, he actually seeks for his peer - he makes himself stand out from others. Individualism is followed by a development in groups and organs; correlative tendencies join up together and become powerfully active: now there arise between these centres of power, friction, war, a reconnoitring of the forces on either side, reciprocity, understandings, and the regulation of mutual services. Finally, there appears an order of rank. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Men are sponges, which, to pour out, receive;
Who know false play, rather than lose, deceive.
For in best understandings sin began,
Angels sinn'd first, then devils, and then man.
Only perchance beasts sin not ; wretched we
Are beasts in all but white integrity. ~ John Donne

He understood a great many things about his parents, and he knew that many times they didn't like his understandings and many other times refused to believe them. ~ Stephen King

We teach boys to be such men as we are. We do not teach them to aspire to be all they can. We do not give them a training as if webelieved in their noble nature. We scarce educate their bodies. We do not train the eye and the hand. We exercise their understandings to the apprehension and comparison of some facts, to a skill in numbers, in words; we aim to make accountants, attorneys, engineers; but not to make able, earnest, great- hearted men. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

In television the democratization of knowledge and its pedagogical commercial exuberance have become one. Consider from the end of the nineties such BBC history shows as Surviving the Iron Age or The Ship: Retracing Cook's Endeavor Voyage - each shown 2001.... All these shows recruit volunteers who are put into environments conspicuously uncomfortable.... An emphasis on participants' surprise at the difficulties of daily life and a previously unexamined and thus taken for granted assumption of physical comfort is the formula for melodrama in these kinds of shows.... All of them are one part soap opera, one part period recreation - and with folks from our time who invite audience identification as "us," viewers mentally enacting too, playing at, reenacting, shadowing, experimenting, speculating, trying to provide evidence for, various understandings of varying pasts.... "Science" and all it stands for - knowledges broadly understood or our everyday knowledge-managed technologies - are especially lively players in the action.... ~ Katie King

You have to recognize that God isn't something outside of you - a cosmic bellboy to whom you pray in order to get this or that if you do the right things. Those kinds of understandings are all ego talk. Everybody - you, me, Osama bin Laden, Adolf Hitler - we all came from the same Source. Then we took on these egos and began to practice all kinds of things based in not having reverence for life, whereas that which is God has reverence for all life. All excuses are nothing more than misalignments with God. ~ Wayne Dyer

As my meditative experiences grew, I had wonderful relationships. I met the most wonderful women, who meditated and shared certain understandings that I had. ~ Frederick Lenz

I still hold my understandings loosely. Faith isn't certainty, I know that by now. If I were certain, I wouldn't need faith. ~ Sarah Bessey

...what struck me the most was my father's total immersion in not only her disease but her quest to get well. That is, as long as Laura was game, he was willing to explore every single option and provide every last bit of support that he could. Moreover, he did so by blurring conventional understandings of medical specialties and medication options, crafting a unique plan of treatment culled from his vast clinical knowledge and that of his peers. It is impossible to know the exact impact of my father's ministrations on Laura's survival, but I would like to think she knew that she was receiving all the expertise and comfort that was humanly available to her. ~ Barron H. Lerner

Spiritual crises happen to us every day. Most of them are sufficiently low grade, devoid of enduring consequences, so we pay no attention and keep on rolling. A spiritual crisis occurs when our identity, our roles, our values, or our road map are substantially called into question, prove ineffective, or are overwhelmed by experience that cannot be contained by our understandings of self and world. ~ James Hollis

Who does ever get what they want? It doesn't seem to happen to many of us if any at all. It's always two people bumping against each other blindly, acting out old ideas and dreams and mistaken understandings. ~ Kent Haruf

I've come to believe that all my past failure and frustration were actually laying
the foundation for the understandings that have created the new level of living I
now enjoy. ~ Anthony Robbins

This book might also be seen as "a Christian primer." A primer teaches us how to read. Reading is not just about learning to recognize and pronounce words, but also about how to hear and understand them. This book's purpose is to help us to read, hear, and inwardly digest Christian language without preconceived understandings getting in the way. ~ Marcus J. Borg

Social thinking skills must be directly taught to children and adults with ASD. Doing so opens doors of social understandings in all areas of life. ~ Temple Grandin

Perhaps not Truths, but stories. We would have ordinary truths and guidance about living and dying, and they would emanate not from some absolute authority or formula but from authority of experience and shared understandings, even negotiated understandings, and from the meanings and wisdom that our discoveries contribute to our shared lives. ~ Diane P. Freedman

We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts. ~ William Hazlitt

To lay hold of and receive the gospel by a true and saving faith is an act of the soul that has been made a new creature, which is the workmanship of God ... Wherefore whoever receiveth the grace that is tendered in the gospel, they must be quickened by the power of God, their eyes must be opened, their understandings illuminated, their ears unstopped, their hearts circumcised, their wills also rectified, and the Son of God revealed in them. ~ John Bunyan

Men have been adjudicating on what women are, and how they should behave, for millennia through the institutions of social control such as religion, the medical profession, psychoanalysis, the sex industry. Feminists have fought to remove the definition of what a woman is from these masculine institutions and develop their own understandings. ~ Sheila Jeffreys

All discourse of which others cannot partake is not only an irksome usurpation of the time devoted to pleasure and entertainment, but, what never fails to excite resentment, an insolent assertion of superiority, and a triumph over less enlightened understandings. The pedant is, therefore, not only heard with weariness but malignity; and those who conceive themselves insulted by his knowledge never fail to tell with acrimony how injudiciously it was exerted. ~ Samuel Johnson

If we observe genuinely happy people, we shall find that they do not just sit around being contented. They make things happen. They pursue new understandings, seek new achievements, and control their thoughts and feelings. In sum, our intentional, effortful activities have a powerful effect on how happy we are, over and above the effects of our set points and the circumstances in which we find themselves. If an unhappy person wants to experience interest, enthusiasm, contentment, peace, and joy, he or she can make it happen by learning the habits of a happy person. ~ Sonja Lyubomirsky

…it is no longer useful to…keep defining and elaborating our understandings of the exact nature of racism, sexism, class and sexual orientation as if they ever operated in isolation. ~ Aurora Levins Morales

When people treat you ill, blame your conduct,
or report anything to your disadvantage, enter into
the very soul of them ; examine their understandings,
and see of what nature they are. You will be fully
convinced that the opinion of such mortals is not
worth one troublesome thought. However, you must
be kind to them, for nature has made them your
relations. Besides, the gods give them all sort of
countenance, warn them by dreams and prophecy,
and help them to those things they have a mind. ~ Marcus Aurelius

Claire understood things about Bay without Bay having to say a word. ~ Sarah Addison Allen

two - queerness and toxicity - have an affinity. They truck with negativity, marginality, and subject-object confusions; they have, arguably, an affective intensity; they challenge heteronormative understandings of intimacy. Both ~ Mel Y. Chen

Following Jesus doesn't mean believing outdated creeds or literal understandings of scripture or turning my back on science. I respect my childhood church. But God is so much bigger. I believe God is alive and as real as my next breath. God wants me to grow and explore new ideas. Now I realize that faith is a journey and not a destination, and God is with me with in all my questions and doubts. God's love includes everyone, including people who ask questions and have doubts! ~ Bruce G. Epperly

Hegel believed that progress is ultimately furthered by the person who is out of step with the majority. Only this person, the genuine nonconformist, really experiences the constraints on freedom. Only this person is in the position of questioning the prevailing understandings of happiness. For ~ Stephen Eric Bronner

It is a neglected but essential fact that we cannot appreciate the relationship between religion and violence unless we grasp the nature and meaning of the two partners in this relationship. Yet our understandings both of religion and of violence are inadequate. Further, we usually consider too few offspring of their troubled marriage: when we think of "religious violence," we tend to think only of holy war and (especially since September 11) religious terrorism. However, those are not the only types of religious violence. ~ Jack David Eller

How wretched are the minds of men, and how blind their understandings.
[Lat., O miseras hominum menteis! oh, pectora caeca!] ~ Lucretius

There are writers who write for fame. And there are writers who write because we need to make sense of the world we live in; writing is a way to clarify, to interpret, to reinvent. We may want our work to be recognized, but that is not the reason we write. We do not write because we must; we always have a choice. We write because language is the way we keep a hold on life. With words we experience our deepest understandings of what it means to be intimate. We communicate to connect, to know community. ~ Bell Hooks

On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy," Burke wrote in the Reflections, "which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings, and which is as void of solid wisdom as it is destitute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be supported only by their own terrors. . . . In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows. Nothing is left which engages the affections on the part of the commonwealth."58 ~ Yuval Levin

Compassion, understandings and respects are the key elements of humanity. To grow means, to embrace all - there is no space for hatred, exclusion and discrimination.
To grow means more respect, more collaboration, more humanity, more integration and more support. ~ Amit Ray

But mark, madam, we live amongst riddles and mysteries
the most obvious things, which come in our way, have dark sides, which thequickest sight cannot penetrate into; and even the clearest and most exalted understandings amongst us find ourselves puzzled and at a loss in almost every cranny of nature's works. ~ Laurence Sterne

A dogmatical spirit inclines a man to be censorious of his neighbors. Every one of his opinions appears to him written, as it were, with sunbeams, and he grows angry that his neighbors do not see it in the same light. He is tempted to disdain his correspondents as men of low and dark understandings because they do not believe what he does. ~ Isaac Watts

I know not a better rule of reading the Scripture, than to read it through from beginning to end and when we have finished it once, to begin it again. We shall meet with many passages which we can make little improvement of, but not so many in the second reading as in the first, and fewer in the third than in the second: provided we pray to him who has the keys to open our understandings, and to anoint our eyes with His spiritual ointment. ~ John Newton

Acceptance is the mother of all understandings ~ Mihail Militaru

On the light side everyone thinks they are the most important, that their own understandings, or their group's understandings, are the key. There's a diversity of cultures and opinions, so there is competition, diffusion, and no single focus. ~ Carlos Barrios

Did the Abrahamic God know that, by "divinely inspiring" the book of Genesis and other tales in the Bible, that He would cause millions to impede scientific understandings of our origins and push for myth to be taught in schools? Shouldn't he have left out the bit about humans being made from dust and ribs, knowing that fact? ~ David G. McAfee

When men take pleasure in feeling their minds elevated with strong drink, and so indulge their appetite as to disorder their understandings, neglect their duty as members of a family or civil society, and cast off all regard to religion, their case is much to be pitied. ~ John Woolman

Too much nicety of detail disgusts the greatest part of readers, and to throw a multitude of particulars under general heads, and lay down rules of extensive comprehension, is to common understandings of little use. ~ Samuel Johnson

To mean understandings, it is sufficient honour to be numbered amongst the lowest labourers of learning; but different abilities must find different tasks. To hew stone, would have been unworthy of Palladio; and to have rambled in search of shells and flowers, had but ill suited with the capacity of Newton. ~ Samuel Johnson

How could those who wrote the Constitution possibly understand its meaning better than those who had the experience of observing and participating in its operation? It is one thing to rail against the evils of politically unaccountable judges enlarging constitutional rights beyond the ideas and purposes of their adopters; another to explain why morally sustainable claims of equality be held captive to the extraordinary obstacles of Article V or subject to the partial and incomplete understandings of 1789 or 1868. ~ Jack N. Rakove

Depoliticization involves removing a political phenomenon from comprehension of its historical emergence and from a recognition of the powers that produce and contour it. No matter its particular form and mechanics, depoliticization always eschews power and history in the representation of its subject. When these two constitutive sources of social relations and political conflict are elided, an ontological naturalness or essentialism almost inevitably takes up residence in our understandings and explanations. In the case at hand, an object of tolerance analytically divested of constitution by history and power is identified as naturally and essentially different from the tolerating subject; in this difference, it appears as a natural provocation to that which tolerates it. Moreover, not merely the parties to tolerance but the very scene of tolerance is naturalized, ontologized in its constitution as produced by the problem of difference itself. ~ Wendy Brown

No ideology can help to create a new world
or a new mind or a new human being
because ideological orientation itself
is the root cause of all the conflicts and all the miseries.
Thought creates boundaries, thought creates divisions and thought creates prejudices; thought itself cannot bridge them. That's why all ideologies fail.
Now man must learn to live without ideologies
religious, political or otherwise. When the mind is not tethered to any ideology, it is free to move to new understandings. And in that freedom flowers all that is good and all that is beautiful. ~ Osho

If the members of a class do not understand
if those directly addressed fail to listen, or listening, fail to recognize a power in the voice
surely the fault lies with the speaker, who, having attempted to secure their attention and enlighten their understandings, has failed in the attempt. ~ George Henry Lewes

Where the subject lies so far beyond our reach, the difference between the highest and the lowest of human understandings may indeed be calculated as infinitely small; yet the degree of weakness may perhaps be measured by the degree of obstinacy and dogmatic confidence. ~ Edward Gibbon

Instead of standing on a stage each day, dispensing knowledge to my young charges, I should guide them as they approach their own understandings. ~ Donalyn Miller

The difference, so observable in men's understandings and parts, does not arise so much from their natural faculties, as acquired habits. ~ John Locke

I'm not talking about reforming #Islam..it is to reform the #Muslim minds & the Muslim understandings of the texts. ~ Tariq Ramadan

As we experience this love, there is a temptation at times to become hostile to our earlier understandings, feeling embarrassed that we were so "simple" or "naive," or "brainwashed" or whatever terms arise when we haven't come to terms with our own story. These past understandings aren't to be denied or dismissed; they're to be embraced. Those experiences belong. Love demands that they belong. That's where we were at that point in our life and God met us there. Those moments were necessary for us to arrive here, at this place at this time, as we are. Love frees us to embrace all of our history, the history in which all things are being made new. ~ Rob Bell

It is only practice that improves our minds as well as bodies, and we must expect nothing from our understandings any farther than they are perfected by habits. ~ John Locke

We are unreasonably desirous to separate the goods of life from those evils which Providence has connected with them, and to catch advantages without paying the price at which they are offered to us. Every man wishes to be rich, but very few have the powers necessary to raise a sudden fortune, either by new discoveries, or by superiority of skill in any necessary employment; and among lower understandings many want the firmness and industry requisite to regular gain and gradual acquisitions. ~ Samuel Johnson

Cross-cultural reality testing forces people to examine both their own and others' understandings of reality. Most people simply assume that the
way they look at things is the way things really are, and judge other cultures' views of reality before understanding them. These judgments are
based on ethnocentrism, which closes the door to further understanding and communication. Furthermore, ethnocentric judgments keep missionaries from examining their own beliefs and values to determine which of them are based on biblical foundations and which on their cultural beliefs. ~ Paul G

There is a fine line between humility and humiliation, and when Augustine's critics, both loyal and disloyal, fault him for morbid self-criticism, they generally mean to imply that he has crossed the line. You can have a relationship with another person only if you know something of humility; otherwise your ego gets in the way. If, however, you are humiliated instead of humbled, there is no 'you' to enter into a relationship. Massilians and Pelagians had differing understandings of when humility before God became too much of a good thing, but they had common cause in not liking Augustine's scruples about the human will to relate to God. If everything about the soul's relationship to God is God's doing, including the very desire to be in relation, where exactly does the soul surface in its redemption? The Word seems to have become a monologue. ~ James Wetzel

Exciting discoveries in neuroscience are allowing us to fit educational methods to new understandings of how the brain develops. ~ John Katzman

If critics say your work stinks it's because they want it to stink and they can make it stink by scaring you into conformity with their comfortable little standards. Standards so low that they can no longer be considered "dangerous" but set in place in their compartmental understandings. ~ Jack Kerouac

There are some Men of one, some but of two Syllogisms, and no more; and others that can but advance one step farther. ~ John Locke

In the ordinary, everyday understandings of the words involved, to say that someone survived death is to contradict yourself; while to assert that all of us live forever is to assert a manifest falsehood, the flat contrary of a universally known truth: namely, the truth that all human beings are mortal. For when, after some disaster, the 'dead' and the 'survivors' have both been listed, what logical space remains for a third category? ~ Antony Flew

There is nothing so easily made offensive as good reasoning; and men of clear logical minds, if not gifted at the same time with tact, make more enemies than men with bad hearts and unsound understandings. ~ Arthur Helps

You are your own most important resource for making your life work. Life rewards action. Until your knowledge, awareness, insights, and understandings are translated into action, they are of no value. ~ Phil McGraw

Nothing could be more admirable than the manner in which for forty years he [Joseph Black] performed this useful and dignified office. His style of lecturing was as nearly perfect as can well be conceived; for it had all the simplicity which is so entirely suited to scientific discourse, while it partook largely of the elegance which characterized all he said or did ... I have heard the greatest understandings of the age giving forth their efforts in its most eloquent tongues-have heard the commanding periods of Pitt's majestic oratory-the vehemence of Fox's burning declamation-have followed the close-compacted chain of Grant's pure reasoning-been carried away by the mingled fancy, epigram, and argumentation of Plunket; but I should without hesitation prefer, for mere intellectual gratification (though aware how much of it is derived from association), to be once more allowed the privilege which I in those days enjoyed of being present while the first philosopher of his age was the historian of his own discoveries, and be an eyewitness of those experiments by which he had formerly made them, once more performed with his own hands. ~ Henry Peter Brougham

Utopianism is, as Plato taught us at the outset, the fire with which we must play because it is the only way we can find out what we are. We need to criticize false understandings of Utopia, but the easy way out provided by realism is deadly. ~ Allan Bloom

When I think about how I understand my role as citizen, setting aside being president, and the most important set of understandings that I bring to that position of citizen, the most important stuff I've learned I think I've learned from novels. It has to do with empathy. It has to do with being comfortable with the notion that the world is complicated and full of grays, but there's still truth there to be found, and that you have to strive for that and work for that. And the notion that it's possible to connect with some[one] else even though they're very different from you. ~ Barack Obama

With Jesus, however, the device of parabolic utterance is used not to explain things to people's satisfaction but to call attention to the unsatisfactoriness of all their previous explanations and understandings. ~ Robert Farrar Capon

I am not very good at expressing myself in a simple way so it can create mis-understandings and I hate that. ~ Marion Cotillard

Persons of mean understandings, not so inquisitive, nor so well instructed, are made good Christians, and by reverence and obedience, implicity believe, and abide by their belief. ~ Michel De Montaigne

The books brought brilliance to my life, and they brought an understanding: Life is a story. Everything that has happened and will happen to me is all part of the story of this enchanted place - all the dreams and visions and understandings that come to me in my dungeon cell. The books helped me see the truth is not in the touch of the stone but in what the stone tells you. ~ Rene Denfeld

New metaphors are capable of creating new understandings and, therefore, new realities. This should be obvious in the case of poetic metaphor, where language is the medium through which new conceptual metaphors are created. ~ George Lakoff

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way -- everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants -- everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor -- anywhere in the world. ~ Patrick Henry

A lot of the shadow self is the home of poetry, story, prayer. My deepest understandings are often released from the part of me of which I am least aware most of the time. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

William Graebner's brilliant analysis of America's struggles over the meaning of Patty Hearst gives us not only new perspectives on the 1970s, on Americans' fundamental understandings of their world in a bicentennial year that offered little to celebrate, but also on the longing for heroism and the desire for belief in free will that Graebner believes structured the rise of Reagan-era conservatism. This is a masterful work of cultural history. ~ Beth Bailey

There is to some men a great Lechery in Lying, and imposing on the understandings of beleeving people. ~ John Aubrey

Mature adults gravitate toward new values and understandings, not just rehashing and blind acceptance of past patterns and previous learning. This is an ongoing process and maturity demands lifelong learners. ~ David W. Earle

In best understandings, sin began, Angels sinned first, then Devils, and then Man. ~ John Donne

A material difference then," she replied - "and no doubt you were much my superior in judgment at that period of our lives; but does not the lapse of one-and-twenty years bring our understandings a good deal nearer? ~ Jane Austen

I let go of the notion that the Bible is a divine product. I learned that it is a human cultural product, the product of two ancient communities, biblical Israel and early Christianity. As such, it contained their understandings and affirmations, not statements coming directly or somewhat directly from God ... I realized that whatever "divine revelation" and the "inspiration of the Bible" meant (if they meant anything), they did not mean that the Bible was a divine product with divine authority. ~ Marcus Borg

Have a humble heart & an open-mind and you'll soon be given glimpses beyond the veil of your beliefs and understandings... growing wiser, and believing deeper. ~ Russell Kyle

while people go on chatting about a million and one things
I mostly sit and observe with ascended understandings
as they bring up the topic of death and of a person dying
I listen quietly while often accidentally smiling
at the absurdity of anybody ever believing in death
I don't mean to be insensitive towards a body's last breath
a higher Reality laid bare, bodily expiration is of no account
with this revelation incalculable life fears we surmount
the Sage is notorious for finding strange things funny
giggling at horrors and ridiculous events not so sunny
sometimes a straight face is merely for show
but spy the glint in his eye about a truth you don't know
an unfounded assumption is that we only live once
not a Mystic throughout history has avowed this occurrence
Christian ones may not have mentioned being reborn again
they also didn't deny it - their teaching was kept plain
just as the Buddha intentionally avoided the God concept
ultimately not essential, under the rug reincarnation is swept ~ Jarett Sabirsh

A smaller axis of progressives do have intuitive and sometimes explicit understandings that the times are-a-changin'. These strata are concentrated around progressive parties such as the Pirate Party (started in Sweden, but had the most success in Germany and lately in Iceland), the Greens, the Feminist Initiative (also Sweden) and The Alternative (a Danish party, by far the most insightful and progressive one, discussed in chapter 5) Such parties are indicative of new progressive strata of the population, representing the groups we can call the triple-H: hipsters, hackers and hippies. ~ Hanzi Freinacht

I have been to this point unwilling to sign on to same-sex marriage primarily because of my understandings of the traditional definitions of marriage. But I also think you're right that attitudes evolve, including mine. ~ Barack Obama

How wonderful it would be if everything could always be as clear and simple as it used to be when you were twelve years old, or twenty years old. If there really were only two colors in the world: black and white. But even the most honest and ingenuous cop, raised on the resounding ideal of the stars and stripes, has to understand sooner or later that there's more than just Darkness and Light out on the streets. There are understandings, concessions, agreements. Informers, traps, provocations. Sooner or later the time comes when you have to betray your own side, plant bags of heroin in pockets, and beat people on the kidneys - carefully, so there are no marks. ~ Sergei Lukyanenko

Individuals are concerned not
with the moral issue of realizing these standards, but with
the amoral issue of engineering a convincing impression that
these standards are being realized. Our activity, then, is
largely concerned with moral matters, but as performers we
do not have a moral concern in these moral matters. As
performers we are merchants of morality. Our day is given
over to intimate contact with the goods we display and our
minds are filled with intimate understandings of them; but it
may well be that the more attention we give to these goods,
th e more d is ta n t we feel from them and from those who are
believing enough to buy them. To use a different imagery,
the very obligation and profitablility of appearing always in
a steady moral light, of being a socialized character, forces
us to be the sort of person who is practiced in the ways of
the stage. ~ Erving Goffman

What has been said of the Roman empire, is at least as true of the British constitution - "This mighty structure has come together thanks to eight hundred years of good fortune and discipline, which cannot be uprooted without destroying the uprooters." This British constitution has not been struck out at an heat by a set of presumptuous men, like the assembly of pettifoggers run mad in Paris.
'Tis not the hasty product of a day,
But the well-ripen'd fruit of wise delay.
It is the result of the thoughts of many minds, in many ages. It is no simple, no superficial thing, nor to be estimated by superficial understandings. An ignorant man, who is not fool enough to meddle with his clock, is however sufficiently confident to think he can safely take to pieces, and put together at his pleasure, a moral machine of another guise, importance and complexity, composed of far other wheels, and springs, and balances, and counteracting and co-operating powers. Men little think how immorally they act in rashly meddling with what they do not understand. Their delusive good intention is no sort of excuse for their presumption. They who truly mean well must be fearful of acting ill. The British constitution may have its advantages pointed out to wise and reflecting minds; but it is of too high an order of excellence to be adapted to those which are common. It takes in too many views, it makes too many combinations, to be so much as comprehended by shallow and superficial under ~ Edmund Burke

If you have the power to hit people over the head whenever you want, you don't have to trouble yourself too much figuring out what they think is going on, and therefore, generally speaking, you don't. Hence the sure-fire way to simplify social arrangements, to ignore the incredibly complex play of perspectives, passions, insights, desires, and mutual understandings that human life is really made of, is to make a rule and threaten to attack anyone who breaks it. This is why violence has always been the favored recourse of the stupid: it is the one form of stupidity to which it is almost impossible to come up with an intelligent response. It is also of course the basis of the state. ~ David Graeber

For the barrier of language is sometimes a blessed barrier, which only lets pass what is good. Or-to put the thing less cynically-we may be better in new clean words, which have never been tainted by our pettiness or vice. ~ E. M. Forster

Men, as well as women, are much oftener led by their hearts than by their understandings. ~ Lord Chesterfield

I put away that stuffed God I had all stitched up with my human understandings and fears. God is less formulaic and quantifiable as he once used to be, but experiencing the reality of his love is infinitely better than dragging that other one around. ~ Jim Palmer