Quotes about Understanding

The first duty of love is to listen.

The wise are wise only because they love.

What is a teacher? I'll tell you: it isn't someone who teaches something, but someone who inspires the student to give of her best in order to discover what she already knows.

We must never forget that spiritual experience is above all a practical experience of love. And with love, there are no rules.

We can never judge the lives of others, because each person knows only their own pain and renunciation. It's one thing to feel that you are on the right path, but it's another to think that yours is the only path.

One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving.

We can never judge the lives of others, because each person knows only their own pain and renunciation. It's one thing to feel that you are on the right path, but it's another to think that yours is the only path.

Satan hates for any person to have the eyes of their understanding opened through the revelation of God's Word.

In Ephesians 1:18, Paul prayed that the eyes of your understanding would be opened. Light expels the darkness, and truth from the Word creates light in the human mind. This light is called understanding. True understanding comes only in the presence of God as the Bread of the Word is continually received.

The people that Love You LOVE YOU---and the people that Don't Never Will.

First, we must learn to read the Bible with our heads, in order to understand what is actually, objectively, being said. And second, we must learn to read it with our hearts, in order to experience God's voice through its pages. By carefully studying the Bible, we come to understand what its writers were originally saying. And by prayerfully exploring it, we learn to discern what the Holy Spirit is saying to us now.

Rob's story reminds me that how we listen is sometimes (always?) more important than what is said. Maybe that's why Jesus was forever asking people if they had ears to hear what he was saying. And I suspect it's also why the very first word of the great Benedictine Rule, which has guided monastic communities for 1,500 years, is this one little word: listen. Fifteen centuries of successful community built on the power of mere listening.