This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"If you understand, things are just as they are. If you don't understand, things are just as they are." - Buddhist Proverbs
"For all our conceits about being the center of the universe, we live in a routine planet of a humdrum star stuck away in an obscure corner ... on an unexceptional galaxy which is one of about 100 billion galaxies. ... That is the fundamental fact of the universe we inhabit, and it is very good for us to understand that." - Carl Sagan
"It is with diseases of the mind as with those of the body; we are half dead before we understand our disorders, and half cured when we do." - Charles Caleb Colton
"It is with diseases of the mind as with diseases of the body, we are half dead before we understand our disorder, and half cured when we do." - Charles Caleb Colton
"Nothing the Great Mystery placed in the land of the Indian pleased the white man, and nothing escaped his transforming hand. Wherever forests have not been mowed down, wherever the animal is recessed in their quiet protection, wherever the earth is not bereft of four-footed life - that to him is an “unbroken wilderness.” But, because for the Lakota there was no wilderness, because nature was not dangerous but hospitable, not forbidding but friendly, Lakota philosophy was healthy - free from fear and dogmatism. And here I find the great distinction between the faith of the Indian and the white man. Indian faith sought the harmony of man with his surrounding; the other sought the dominance of surrounding. In sharing, in loving all and everything, one people naturally found a due portion of the thing they sought, while, in fearing, the other found need of conquest. For one man the world was full of beauty; for the other it was a place of sin and ugliness to be endured until he went to another world, there to become a creature of wings, half-man and half-bird. Forever one man directed his Mystery to change the world He had made; forever this man pleaded with Him to chastise the wicked ones; and forever he implored his God to send His light to earth. Small wonder this man could not understand the other. But the old Lakota was wise. He knew that man’s heart, away from nature, become hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans, too. So he kept his children close to nature’s softening influence." -
"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." - Chinese Proverbs
"The heart of man is more dangerous than mountains and rivers, more difficult to understand than Heaven itself." - Chuang Tzu, also spelled Chuang-tsze, Chuang Chou, Zhuangzi, Zhuang Tze, Zhuang Zhou, Chuang Tsu, Chouang-Dsi, Chuang Tse, or Chuangtze
"I have the conviction that when physiology will be far enough advanced, the poet, the philosopher and the physiologist will all understand each other." - Claude Bernard
"Wisdom, compassion and courage - these are three universally recognized moral qualities of man. It matters not in what way men come to the exercise of these moral qualities, the result is one and the same. When a man understands the nature and use of these three moral qualities, he will then understand how to put in order his personal conduct and character; he will understand how to govern men." - Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
"The people may be made to follow a line of action, but they cannot be made to understand it." - Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." - Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
"While still unable to do your duty to the living, how can you do your duty to the dead?... Not yet understanding life, how can you understand death?" - Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
"Tell me and I'll forget. Show me and I'll remember. Involve me and I'll understand." - Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
"Just being a Negro doesn't qualify you to understand the race situation any more than being sick makes you an expert on medicine." - Dick Gregory
"To understand the world is wise than to condemn it. To study the world is better than to shun it. To use the world is nobler than to abuse it. To make the world better, lovelier, and happier, is the noblest work of man or woman... He who imagines he can do without the world deceives himself much; but he who fancies the world cannot do without him is still more mistaken." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"Consciously or not, we are all on a quest for answers, trying to learn the lessons of life. We grapple with fear and guilt. We search for meaning, love, and power. We try to understand fear, loss, and time. We seek to discover who we are and how we can become truly happy… Not all of these lessons are enjoyable to learn, but everyone finds that they enrich the texture of life." - Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
"Before we can forgive one another, we have to understand one another." - Emma Goldman
"We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand." - Eric Hoffer
"Imagination I understand to be the representation of an individual thought. Imagination is of three kinds: joined with belief of that which is to come; joined with memory of that which is past; and of things present." - Francis Bacon
"To understand all, is to forgive everything." - French Proverbs
"The knowledge of a single fact acquired through a discovery of its causes prepares the mind to understand and ascertain other facts without need of recourse to experiment." - Galileo Galilei, known simply as Galileo
"All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them." - Galileo Galilei, known simply as Galileo
"Man is a machine. All his actions, words, thoughts, feelings, opinions and habits are the results of external influences, external impressions. Out of himself a man cannot produce a single thought, a single action. Everything he says, does , thinks, feels - all this happens. To establish this fact for oneself, to be convinced of its truth, means getting ride of a thousand illusions about man, about his being creative and consciously organizing his own life, and so on. But it is one thing to understand with the mind and another thing to feel with one’s ‘whole mass’, to be really convinced that it is so and never forget it." - George Gurdjieff, fully George Ivanovich Gurdjieff
"If perfection is, as it should be, the ultimate justification of being, we may understand the ground of the moral dignity of beauty." - George Santayana
"To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be." - George Santayana
"It is the acme of life to understand life." - George Santayana
"To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic." - George Santayana
"Man is not made to understand life, but to live it." - George Santayana
"No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness." - Graham Greene
"The Great Spirit is everywhere; he hears whatever is in our minds and hearts, and it is not necessary to speak to Him in a loud voice. Since the drum is often the only instrument used in our sacred rites, I should perhaps tell you here why it is especially sacred and important to us. It is because the round form of the drum represents the whole universe, and its strong beat is the pulse, the heart, throbbing at the center of the universe. It is as the voice of Wakan-Tanka, and this sound stirs us and helps us to understand the mystery and power of all things." - Nicholas Black Elk, formally Heȟáka Sápa
"Marriage is like a war. There are moments of chivalry and gallantry that attend the victorious advances and strategic retreats, the birth or death of children, the momentary conquest of loneliness, the sacrifice that ennobles him who makes it. But mostly there are the long dull sieges, the waiting, the terror and boredom. Women understand this better than men; they are better able to survive attrition." - Helen Hayes
"It's good to be just plain happy; it's a little better to know that you're happy; but to understand that you're happy and to know why and how and still be happy, be happy in the being and the knowing, well that is beyond happiness, that is bliss." - Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
"Everyone is biased, whether they know it or not, in possessing fundamental goals, purposes, and ends. If we understand that, we can be properly skeptical of all historians (and journalists and anyone who reports on the world) and check to see if their biases cause them to emphasize certain things in history and omit or give slight consideration to others." - Howard Zinn
"Missing from [history] are the countless small actions of unknown people that led up to those great moments. When we understand this, we can see that the tiniest acts of protest in which we engage may become the invisible roots of social change." - Howard Zinn
"We have to understand the world can only be grasped by an action, not by contemplation. . . . The most powerful drive in the ascent of man is his pleasure in his own skill. He loves to do what he does well and, having done it well, he loves to do it better. . . . The hand is the cutting edge of the mind." - Jacob Bronowski
"One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other." - Jane Austen
"When you have your own children you will understand your obligation to your parents." - Japanese Proverbs
"We ought not to understand God and creation as two things distinct from each other, but as one and the same." - Johannes Scotus Erigena
"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones." - John Cage, fully John Milton Cage, Jr.
"[We] can best understand learning as growth, an expanding of ourselves into the world around us. We can also see that there is no difference between living and learning, that living is learning, that it is impossible, and misleading, and harmful to think of them as being separate." - John Holt, fully John Caldwell Holt
"The willingness to harm or hurt comes ultimately out of fear. Non-harming requires that you see your own fears and that you understand them and own them. Owning them means taking responsibility for them. Taking responsibility means not letting fear completely dictate your vision or your view. Only mindfulness completely dictate your vision or your view. Only mindfulness of our own clinging and rejecting, and a willingness to grapple with these mind states, however painful the encounter, can free us from this circle of suffering. Without a daily embodiment in practice, lofty ideals tend to succumb to self-interest." - Jon Kabat-Zinn
"Conscience and self-love, if we understand our true happiness, always lead us the same way. Duty and interest are perfectly coincident; for the most part in this world, but entirely and in every instance if we take in the future, and the whole; this being implied in the notion of a good and perfect administration of things." - Joseph Butler
"O Friend, hope for Him whilst you live, know whilst you live, understand whilst you live; for in life deliverance abides. If your bonds be not broken whilst living, what hope of deliverance in death? It is but an empty dream that the soul shall have union with Him because it has passed form the body; if He is found now, He is found then; if not, we do not but go to dwell in the City of Death." - Kabir, also Kabīra NULL
"Only our spirits can understand beauty, or live and grow with it. It puzzles our minds; we are unable to describe it in words; it is a sensation that our yes cannot see, derived from both the one who observes and the one who is looked upon." - Kahlil Gibran
"He who repeats what he does not understand is no better than an ass that is loaded with books." - Kahlil Gibran
"To understand the heart and mind of a person, look not at what he has already achieved, but at what he aspires to do." - Kahlil Gibran
"We must understand that God is the measure of all reality and propriety, understand that eternity exists first and then time, and therefore the future first and then the present, as surely as the Creature exists first and then the creature." - Karl Barth