Every great work of art has two faces: one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.
Daniel Barenboim (b. 1942) Argentine-Israeli pianist and conductor
Quoted in the International Herald Tribune (20 Jan 1989)
The above is sometimes cited to his collaborative dialog with Edward Said, Parallels and Paradoxes (2002), but the passage there is slightly different: "I think that every great work of art has two faces: one toward its own time and one toward eternity."
Quotations about:
understanding
Note not all quotations have been tagged, so Search may find additional quotes on this topic.
And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong.
Though each was partly in the right
And all were in the wrong!So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!John Godfrey Saxe (1816-1887) American poet and satirist
“The Blind Men and the Elephant,” st. 8 and “Moral” (c. 1861; publ. 1872)
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Saxe introduced the parable, which dates back to India (c. 500 BC) to American audiences. He wrote the poem originally against what he felt was extremism on both sides that led the the American Civil War.
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) American fabulist [Howard Phillips Lovecraft]
“The Call of Cthulhu,” ch. 1, opening words (1928)
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That seems to point up a significant difference between Europeans and Americans:
A European says: I can’t understand this, what’s wrong with me?
An American says: I can’t understand this, what’s wrong with him?
I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another when the best fruit is.
There is no “True.” There are only ways of perceiving.
Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) French writer, novelist
Letter to Léon Hennique (3 Feb 1880) [tr. Steegmuller (1982)]
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We pick our friends not only because they are kind and enjoyable company, but also, perhaps more importantly, because they understand us for who we think we are.
Alain de Botton (b. 1969) Swiss-British author
The Consolations of Philosophy, ch. 4 “Consolation for Inadequacy” (2000)
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Stupidity lies in wanting to draw conclusions.
[L’ineptie consiste à vouloir conclure. […] Oui, la bêtise consiste à vouloir conclure.]
Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) French writer, novelist
Letter to Louis Bouilhet (4 Sep 1850)
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The phrase is used twice in the letter. The initial phrase is usually translated to "foolishness" or "folly," the second to "stupidity."
Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering — because you can’t take it in all at once.
Audrey Hepburn (1929-1993) Belgian-English actress
Quoted in David Hofstede, Audrey Hepburn: A Bio-bibliography (1994)
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Be not afraid! In admitting a creator, refuse not to examine his creation; and take not the assertions of creatures like yourselves, in place of the evidence of your senses and the conviction of your understanding.
Frances "Fanny" Wright (1795-1852) Scottish-American writer, lecturer, social reformer
A Course of Popular Lectures, Lecture 3, “Of the more Important Divisions and Essential Parts of Knowledge” (1829)
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The Creator had a lot of remarkably good ideas when he put the world together, but making it understandable hadn’t been one of them.
We readily inquire, “Does he know Greek or Latin?” “Can he write poetry and prose?” But what matters most is what we put last: “Has he become better and wiser?” We ought to find out not who understands most but who understands best.
[Nous nous enquerons volontiers: “Sçait-il du Gre ou du Latin? Estriil en vers ou en prose?” Mais sìl est devenu ou plus advisé, c’estoit le principal, et c’est ce qui demeure derrier. Il falloit sènquerir qui est mieux sçavant, non qui est plus sçavant.]
Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) French essayist
The Complete Essays, I:25 “On Schoolmasters [Du pédantisme]”
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Better keep yourself clean and bright: you are the window through which you must see the world.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) British playwright and critic
The Revolutionist’s Handbook, “Honor” (1905)
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Grammar, perfectly understood, enables us, not only to express our meaning fully and clearly, but so to express it as to enable us to defy the ingenuity of man to give to our words any other meaning than that which we ourselves intend them to express.
William Cobbett (1763-1835) English politician, agriculturist, journalist, pamphleteer
A Grammar of the English Language, Letter 2 (1818)
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Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Charles "Charlie" Stross (b. 1964) British writer
The Nightmare Stacks, ch. 18 (2016)
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A variant of Clarke's Third Law.
Don’t express your ideas too clearly. Most people think little of what they understand, and venerate what they do not. […] Many praise without being able to say why. They venerate anything hidden or mysterious, and they praise it because they hear it praised.
[No allanarse sobrado en el concepto. Los más no estiman lo que entienden, lo que no perciben lo veneran. […] Alaban muchos lo que, preguntados, no saben dar razón. ¿Por qué? Todo lo recóndito veneran por misterio y lo celebran porque oyen celebrarlo.]
Baltasar Gracián y Morales (1601-1658) Spanish Jesuit priest, writer, philosopher
The Art of Worldly Wisdom [Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia], § 253 (1647) [tr. Maurer (1992)]
(Source)
(Source (Spanish)). Alternate translations:
Not to be too intelligible. Most part do not esteem what they conceive, but admire what they understand not. [...] Many praise that which they can give no reason for, when it is asked them: because they reverence as a mystery all that is hard to be comprehended, and extoll it, by reason they hear it extolled.
[Flesher ed. (1685)]
Do not Explain overmuch. Most men do not esteem what they understand, and venerate what they do not see. [...] Many praise a thing without being able to tell why, if asked. The reason is that they venerate the unknown as a mystery, and praise it because they hear it praised.
[tr. Jacobs (1892)]
A Bit Vague. For most men have low regard for what they understand, and venerate only what is beyond them. [...] Many praise, but if asked can give no reason: Why? for they revere all that is hidden because mysterious, and they sing its praises, because they hear its praises being sung.
[tr. Fischer (1937)]
Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. This is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to cast over nature.
The world is not always a kind place. That’s something all children learn for themselves, whether we want them to or not, but it’s something they really need our help to understand.
We begin to notice, besides our particular sinful acts, our sinfulness; begin to be alarmed not only about what we do, but about what we are. This may sound rather difficult, so I will try to make it clear from my own case. When I come to my evening prayers and try to reckon up the sins of the day, nine times out of ten the most obvious one is some sin against charity; I have sulked or snapped or sneered or snubbed or stormed. And the excuse that immediately springs to my mind is that the provocation was so sudden and unexpected; I was caught off my guard, I had not time to collect myself.
Now that may be an extenuating circumstance as regards those particular acts: they would obviously be worse if they had been deliberate and premeditated. On the other hand, surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of a man he is? Surely what pops out before the man has time to put on a disguise is the truth? If there are rats in a cellar you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats: it only prevents them from hiding. In the same way the suddenness of the provocation does not make me an ill-tempered man; it only shows me what an ill-tempered man I am. The rats are always there in the cellar, but if you go in shouting and noisily they will have taken cover before you switch on the light.
C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) English writer, literary scholar, lay theologian [Clive Staples Lewis]
Mere Christianity, “Let’s Pretend” (1952)
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He whose Belly is full, believes not him whose is empty.
Thomas Fuller (1654-1734) English physician, preacher, aphorist, writer
Gnomologia: Adages and Proverbs, #2399 (1732)
(Source)
Don’t write so you can be understood. Write so that you cannot be misunderstood.
Quintilian (39-90) Roman orator [Marcus Fabius Quintilianus]
De Institutione Oratoria, Book 8, ch. 2, l. 24
Alt. trans.: "We should not write so that it is possible for [the reader] to understand us, but so that it is impossible for him to misunderstand us."
Also attributed to Epictetus, Francis Bacon, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William Taft.
There are some philosophers who exist to uphold the status quo, and others who exist to upset it — Marx, of course, belongs to the second lot. For my part, I should reject both those as not being the true business of a philosopher, and I should say the business of a philosopher is not to change the world but to understand it, which is the exact opposite to what Marx said.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) English mathematician and philosopher
Interview by Woodrow Wyatt, BBC TV (1959)
Collected in Bertrand Russell's BBC Interviews (1959) [UK] and Bertrand Russell Speaks His Mind (1960) [US]. Reprinted (abridged) in The Humanist (1982-11/12), and in Russell Society News, #37 (1983-02).
Those who are destitute of philosophy may be compared to prisoners in a cave, who are only able to look in one direction because they are bound, and who have a fire behind them and a wall in front. Between them and the wall there is nothing; all that they see are shadows of themselves, and of objects behind them, cast on the wall by the light of the fire. Inevitably they regard these shadows as real, and have no notion of the objects to which they are due. At last, some man succeeds in escaping from the cave to the light of the sun; for the first time he sees real things, and becomes aware that he had hitherto been deceived by shadows. If he is the sort of philosopher who is fit to become a guardian, he will feel it is his duty to those who were formerly his fellow prisoners to go down again into the cave, instruct them as to the truth, and show them the way up. But he will have difficulty in persuading them, because, coming out of the sunlight, he will see shadows less clearly than they do, and will seem to them stupider than before his escape.
What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that’s really the essence of programming. By the time you’ve sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you’ve learned something about it yourself.
To understand the heart and mind of a person, look not at what he has already achieved, but at what he aspires to.
Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931) Lebanese-American poet, writer, painter [Gibran Khalil Gibran]
(Attributed)
(Source)
Successful problem solving requires finding the right solution to the right problem. We fail more often because we solve the wrong problem than because we get the wrong solution to the right problem.
Trust your reader. Not everything needs to be explained. If you really know something, and breathe life into it, they’ll know it too.
Esther Freud (b. 1963) British novelist, actress
In “Ten Rules for Writing Fiction,” The Guardian (20 Feb 2010)
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DESDEMONA: Upon my knees, what doth your speech import?
I understand a fury in your words,
But not the words.William Shakespeare (1564-1616) English dramatist and poet
Othello, Act 4, sc. 2, l. 37ff (4.2.37-39) (1603)
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And whereas sense and memory are but knowledge of fact, which is a thing past and irrevocable, science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another; by which, out of that we can presently do, we know how to do something else when we will, or the like, another time: because when we see how anything comes about, upon what causes, and by what manner; when the like causes come into our power, we see how to make it produce the like effects.
You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955) German-American physicist
(Attributed)
Alternate versions:No source found. The quote is frequently also attributed to Richard Feynman. It is likely based on a similar quote by Ernest Rutherford.
- "If you can't explain something to a six-year-old, you really don't understand it yourself."
- "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."
The closest reference to it can be found in Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times (1972):
To de Broglie, Einstein revealed an instinctive reason for his inability to accept the purely statistical interpretation of wave mechanics. It was a reason which linked him with Rutherford, who used to state that "it should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid." Einstein, having a final discussion with de Broglie on the platform of the Gare du Nord in Paris, whence they had traveled from Brussels to attend the Fresnel centenary celebrations, said "that all physical theories, their mathematical expressions apart ought to lend themselves to so simple a description 'that even a child could understand them.'"
More discussion of this quotation here.
Nothing has more retarded the advancement of learning than the disposition of vulgar minds to ridicule and vilify what they cannot comprehend.
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) English writer, lexicographer, critic
The Rambler, #117 (30 Apr 1751)
(Source)
Presented as a letter from "Hypertatus"
For the trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods.
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) German-American philosopher, political theorist
“Lying in Politics,” Crises of the Republic (1969)
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Your friend is the man who knows all about you, and still likes you.
Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) American writer, businessman, philosopher
A Thousand and One Epigrams (1911)
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Reprinted in The Notebook of Elbert Hubbard (1927).
Pity cureth Envy.
Thomas Fuller (1654-1734) English physician, preacher, aphorist, writer
Gnomologia: Adages and Proverbs, #3876 (1732)
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Experience of the world may be looked upon as a kind of text, to which reflection and knowledge form the commentary. Where there is great deal of reflection and intellectual knowledge, and very little experience, the result is like those books which have on each page two lines of text to forty lines of commentary. A great deal of experience with little reflection and scant knowledge, gives us books like those of the editio Bipontina where there are no notes and much that is unintelligible.
[Auch läßt die eigene Erfahrung sich ansehn als der Text; Nachdenken und Kenntnisse als der Kommentar dazu. Viel Nachdenken und Kenntnisse, bei wenig Erfahrung, gleicht den Ausgaben, deren Seiten zwei Zeilen Text und vierzig Zeilen Kommentar darbieten. Viel Erfahrung, bei wenig Nachdenken und geringen Kenntnissen, gleicht den bipontinischen Ausgaben, ohne Noten, welche Vieles unverstanden lassen.]
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) German philosopher
Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. 1, “Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life [Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit],” ch. 5 “Counsels and Maxims [Paränesen und Maximen],” § 2.8 (1851) [tr. Saunders (1890)]
(Source)
Saunders notes that the editiones Bipontinae were "a series of Greek, Latin and French classics published at Zweibraecken in the Palatinate, from and after the year 1779."
Source (German). Alternate translation:
Our own experience may be regarded as the text, and reflection and knowledge as the commentary thereto. Much reflection and knowledge with little experience resemble those editions whose pages present us with two lines of text and forty lines of commentary. Much experience with little reflection and scanty knowledge is like the editiones Bipontinae which are without notes and contain much that is unintelligible.
[tr. Payne (1974)]
To be effective a doctrine must not be understood, but has to be believed in. We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand. A doctrine that is understood is shorn of its strength.
Eric Hoffer (1902-1983) American writer, philosopher, longshoreman
The True Believer, ch. 57 (1951)
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