Quotes about Comprehension
To be master of any branch of knowledge, you must master those which lie next to it; and thus to know anything you must know all.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
For I do not seek to understand in order to believe, but I believe in order to understand. For I believe this: unless I believe, I will not understand.
— Anselm of Canterbury
On the dogmas of religion, as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarreling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind.
— Thomas Jefferson
You do not understand even life. How can you understand death?
— Confucius
Do you think horses understand what people say? I aint sure most people do.
— Cormac McCarthy
Music is made out of nothing but some fairly simple rules. Yet it's true that no one made them up. The rules. The notes themselves amount to almost nothing. But why some particular arrangement of these notes should have such a profound effect on our emotions is a mystery beyond even the hope of comprehension. Music is not a language. it has no reference to anything other than itself
— Cormac McCarthy
and he also told me that I should rethink submitting my thesis. He read your thesis. He read three different drafts of it, actually. Did he understand it? Pretty much. He understood what was wrong with it. And that was? That nobody could understand it.
— Cormac McCarthy
He said that if a person understood the soul of the horse then he would understand all horses that ever were.
— Cormac McCarthy
You will see. It is difficult even for brothers to travel together on such a voyage. The road has its own reasons and no two travelers will have the same understanding of those reasons. If indeed they come to an understanding of them at all.
— Cormac McCarthy
So where does music come from? No one knows. A platonic theory of music just muddies the water. Music is made out of nothing but some fairly simple rules. Yet it's true that no one made them up. The rules. The notes themselves amount to almost nothing. But why some particular arrangement of these notes should have such a profound effect on our emotions is a mystery beyond even the hope of comprehension. Music is not a language.
— Cormac McCarthy
You don't need to be told some things. You can sometimes tell more by a man's silence and the set of his head than by what he says.
— Wendell Berry
The mind that comes to rest is tended In ways that it cannot intend: Is borne, preserved, and comprehended By what it cannot comprehend. Your Sabbath, Lord, thus keeps us by Your will, not ours. And it is fit Our only choice should be to die Into that rest, or out of it.
— Wendell Berry