This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The man of understanding finds everything laughable." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"We are born and we die. By understanding our interrelatedness to the chain gang of life, meaning comes." - Nancy Graves
"I have ever gained the most profit, and the most pleasure also, from the books which have made me think the most: and, when the difficulties have once been overcome, these are the books which have struck the deepest root, not only in my memory and understanding, but likewise in my affections." - Julius Charles Hare (1795-1855) and his brother Augustus William Hare
"When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressive creature. He becomes interesting to other people, He disturbs, upsets, enlightens, and opens ways for a better understanding. Where those who are not artists are trying to close the book, he opens it and there are still more pages possible." - Robert Henri
"As children we all possess a natural, uninhibited curiosity, a hunger for explanation, which seems to die slowly as we age - suppressed, I suppose, by the high value we place on conformity and by the need not to appear ignorant. It betokens a conviction that somehow science is innately incomprehensible. It precludes reaching deeper, thereby denying the profound truth that understanding enriches experience, that explanation vastly enhances beauty of the natural world in the eye of the beholder." - Mahlon Hoagland
"Leisure is the mother of philosophy... The source of every crime , is some defect of the understanding; or some error in reasoning; or some sudden force of the passions... And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." - Thomas Hobbes
"I had a "near death experience" and remember thinking, "If only people knew what it was like to die, they wouldn't be afraid." I reached a point at which a voice began to ask me if I thought I'd completed what I'd come to do. was I going to leave my son, then age three, behind? There was no sense of threat or coercion. An absolute acceptance that whatever I did was all right, but pointing out that the moment of choice was now. The relief and release from the fear of dying changed my life. The reminder that "I am not my body" freed me to live my life in a different way. The understanding that no matter what is going on in our bodies, the essence of who we are is unaffected; this wisdom has enabled me to help other see their bodies in a different way. To see the body in illness not as an enemy, but as a faithful fried, programmed by; the soul to react in that exact way. To see illness as a confrontation in the physical of what one is reluctant to confront on the mental or emotional levels. In other words, a message, a communication, a time to listen and therefore a unique and powerful opportunity for transformation." - Soozi Holbeche
"Understanding reduces the greatest to simplicity, and lack of it causes the least to take on the magnitude of complexity." - Raymond Holliwell
"Understanding is a great experience in itself, but it does not come through instruction." - Anthony Hope, fully Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins
"Never speak by superlatives; for in so doing you will be likely to wound either truth or prudence. Exaggeration is neither thoughtful, wise, nor safe. It is a proof of the weakness of the understanding, or the want of discernment of him that utters it, so that even when he speaks the truth, he soon finds it is received with partial, or even utter disbelief." - David Hume
"The memory, senses, and understanding are, therefore, all of them founded on the imagination, or the vivacity of our ideas." - David Hume
"Instead of production, primarily, we have to think of sustainability. Instead of dominating nature, we have to acknowledge that nature is our source and best teacher. Instead of understanding the world in parts, we need to think about the whole." - Wes Jackson
"We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy." - Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
"Art must unquestionably have a social value; that is, as a potential means of communication it must be addressed, and in comprehensible terms, to the understanding of mankind." - Rockwell Kent
"In the business of life, Man is the only product. And there is only one direction in which man can possibly develop if he is to make a better living or yield a bigger dividend to himself, to his race, to nature or to God. He must grow in knowledge, wisdom, kindliness and understanding." - V. C. Kitchen, fully Victor C. Kitchen
"Organized religion obviously prevents the understanding of a problem because the mind is conditioned by dogma and belief." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
"Religion is really experiencing a state in which there is creation. This is not an idea, a process. It can be realized when there is freedom from self. There can be freedom from self only through understanding the self in relationship; but there can be no understanding in isolation." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
"Truth is not to be known. What is known is a thing of the past; it is already dead. Truth is living, not static; therefore you cannot know truth. Truth is a constant movement, it has not abode, a mind that is tethered to a belief, to knowledge, to a particular conditioning, is incapable of understanding what truth is." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
"Wisdom comes into being only when there is an understanding of knowledge and the freedom from the known... When there is freedom from the known then relationship changes totally." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
"Wisdom is alone, but a lonely path does not lead to wisdom. Isolation is death, and wisdom is not found in withdrawal. There is no path to wisdom, for all paths are separative, exclusive. In their very nature, paths can only lead to isolation, though these isolations are called unity, the whole, the one, and so end is as the means. The means is not separate from the goal, the “what should be.” Wisdom comes with the understanding of one’s relationship with the field, with the passer-by, with the fleeting thought. To withdraw, to isolate oneself in order to find, is to put an end to discovery. Relationship leads to an aloneness that is not of isolation. There must be an aloneness, not of the enclosing mind, but of freedom. The complete is the alone, and incompleteness seeks the way of isolation." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
"Growing up is after all only the understanding that one's unique and incredible experience is what everyone shares." - Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
"As there is a partiality to opinions, which is apt to mislead the understanding, so there is also a partiality to studies, which is prejudicial to knowledge." - John Locke
"It is an established opinion among some men that there are in the understanding certain innate principles, some primary notions, stamped, as it were, upon the mind of man which the soul receives in its very first being, and brings into the world with it. It would be sufficient to convince unprejudiced readers of the falseness of this supposition, if I should only show how many men obtain to all the knowledge they have, without the help of any such innate impressions... Let us suppose the mind to be a blank tablet; how comes it to be furnished? To this answer in one word, from experience." - John Locke
"Reverie is when ideas float in our mind without reflection or regard of the understanding." - John Locke
"The improvement of the understanding is for two ends; first, our own increase of knowledge; secondly, to enable us to deliver that knowledge to others." - John Locke
"Truth, whether in or out of fashion, is the measure of knowledge, and the business of the understanding; whatever is besides that, however authorized by consent, or recommended by rarity, is nothing but ignorance, or something worse." - John Locke
"Poetry is not made out of the understanding. The question of common sense is always: "What is it good for?' a question which would abolish the rose, and be triumphantly answered by the cabbage." - James Russell Lowell
"The mind has more to do with holding the fastnesses of life and has more sovereign sway over it than the power of the soul. For without the understanding and the mind no part of the soul can maintain itself in the frame the smallest fraction of time." - Lucretius, fully Titus Lucretius Carus NULL
"Knowledge is all-knowing, understanding, forgiving; it takes up no position, sets no store by form. It has compassion with the abyss - it is the abyss. So we reject it, firmly, and henceforward our concern shall be with beauty only. And by beauty we mean simplicity, largeness, and renewed severity of discipline; we mean a return to detachment and to form." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
"Real education belongs to the future; most of our education is a form of tribal conditioning, a pilgrimage in routine and premature adjustment. When education stirs our innermost feelings and loyalties, when it awakens us from the slumber of lethargy, when it brings individuals together through understanding and compassion, it becomes our foremost hope for lasting greatness." - Frederick Mayer
"Psychoanalysis has changed American psychology from a diagnostic to a therapeutic science, not because so many patients are cured by the psychoanalytic technique, but because of the new understanding of psychiatric patients it has given us, and the new and different concept of illness and health." -
"Just as education without humanity is the most dangerous thing in the world, so education in love, human understanding and cooperation is the greatest hope of the world." - Joy Elmer Morgan
"I feel that just understanding near-death experiences will be our first step at healing the great division between science and religion that started with Isaac Newton almost three hundred years ago. Educating physicians, nurses, and ourselves about what people experience in those final hours will shatter our prejudices about the ways we think about medicine and life." - Melvin L. Morse
"We are here to live and love the fullness of God’s presence...God’s presence awaits us everywhere. In the sum total of daily revelations lies not simply a formula for understanding life but an invitation to immerse ourselves in it. The meaning of life is something to be experienced." - James Parks Morton
"What, then, is the nature of the reality that we believe in evidentially? Transiency is the main reality. We appear to live in an ever-perishing world. It seems that our life is confined to a single instant at a time. We see everything passing away - for ever, as we say, without having the slightest idea of what we mean by this expression. Where does everything go - for ever? Where do our lives go? Certainly they are not contained in a space of three dimensions. We witness, apparently, events, people, and things disappearing into total extinction, into an absolute nothingness, as the result of passing-time. This is the reality of appearances as registered by our senses. There goes with it a particular understanding of life." - Maurice Nicoll
"Every man has just as much vanity as he wants understanding." - Alexander Pope
"Reading, for a man devoid of prior-understanding, is like a blind man’s looking into a mirror." - Garuda Purana
"The more and more you listen, the more and more you hear; the more and more you hear, the deeper and deeper your understanding becomes." - Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
"The question is, whether, like the Divine Child I the temple, we are turning knowledge into wisdom, and whether, understanding more of the mysteries of life, we are feeling more of its sacred law; and whether, having left behind the priests and the scribes and the doctors and the fathers, we are about our Father’s business, and becoming wise to God." -
"Women have the understanding of the heart, which is better than that of the head." - Samuel Rogers
"Whether man is disposed to yield to nature or to oppose her, he cannot do without a correct understanding of her language." - Jean Rostand
"Wealth consists in talent, not in possessions; greatness, in understanding, not in age." - Sa'di (or Saadi), pen name of Abū-Muḥammad Muṣliḥ al-Dīn bin Abdallāh Shīrāzī, born Muslih-uddin NULL
"It is not enough for parents to understand children. they must accord children the privilege of understanding them." - Milton R. Sapirstein
"Since the beginning of civilization we have explained our existence in terms of what we could observe... Maybe we will discover that the only true reality is a state of mind, shaped by the information we can process and contexts in which we see it. Maybe the Supreme Being we call God can best be appreciated as the power of ultimate understanding. Maybe our destination has always been to learn and grow as we approach the light of ultimate understanding. Only the context of our ability to process information changes." - Frank Scully
"It is the same with understanding as with eyes; to a certain size and make, just so much light is necessary, and no more. Whatever is beyond brings darkness and confusion." - Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury
"To know our purpose for being here, we have to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know God who created us... Through knowing God’s love, through prayer, we come to find our best self. Each of us has a call. No two of us are alike in our potential for growth and development... Sometimes we find our meaning from our successes. Sometimes suffering is the prelude to understanding, and we realize that eventually, out of darkness, comes light... I chose to try to know God and to find a deeper meaning in life through sharing my life with others, reaching out and being more vulnerable and open to the stranger, the one in need, the depressed and the ill... The specific purpose each one of us discovers along the way, we do have a common purpose. It is to become part of the life of God; to know, love and serve Him; to come to know and love our brothers and sisters; to be energized and made whole by God’s tremendous love for us in this life and the next, a love that binds us all together." - Gilmary Simmons, born Eileen Catherine Simmons
"Depend on this one fact: The future of mankind, peace, progress and prosperity must be finally determined by the extent to which men can be brought to a state of common and honest understanding." - Francis Edward Smedley
"Understanding comes through communication, and through understanding we find the way to peace." - Ralph C. Smedley