#standing

Boys are beyond the range of anybody's sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of 18 months and 90 years. ↗

— James Thurber

#anybody #between #beyond #least #months

It isn't until you come to a spiritual understanding of who you are - not necessarily a religious feeling, but deep down, the spirit within - that you can begin to take control. ↗

— Oprah Winfrey

#come #control #deep #deep down #down

... understanding, and action proceeding from understanding and guided by it, is the one weapon against the world's bombardment, the one medicine, the one instrument by which liberty, health, and joy may be shaped or shaped towards, in the individual, and in the race. ↗

— James Agee

#age

It is time... to end the long-standing and unproductive methodological debate over 'originalism' versus 'dynamism' or 'evolution' and focus instead on how, as a substantive matter, we should interpret the Constitution in the twenty-first century, and what it has to say on questions unimaginable to our eighteenth-century Framers. ↗

— Diane Wood

#constitution #debate #dynamism #end #evolution

I'm a lion in a strange land. ↗

— Criss Jami

#awkwardness #beast #courage #different #earth

Mama said it's probably because of Suzanne, and that you are never the same after a child dies. That made me wonder what she was like before Clover died, because I don't think I really knew my own mother until I had children, and if she was different before, I don't remember. ↗

— Nancy E. Turner

#death #mother #motherhood #understanding #death

We must make haste then, not only because we are daily nearer to death, but also because the conception of things and the understanding of them cease first. ↗

— Marcus Aurelius

#knowledge #understanding #death

the underlying struggle - between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together, and those who would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us... ↗

— Barack Obama

#cruelty #homosexuality #politics #religion #respect

There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil, a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome." "And your defect is a propensity to hate everybody." "And yours," he replied with a smile, "is wilfully to misunderstand them. ↗

— Jane Austen

#defects #dislike #education #hatred #misunderstanding

Human beings have always been an unfinished species, a story in the middle, a succession of families, tribes, and societies in transition to new awarenesses. Although we have always prided ourselves on our willingness to adapt to all habitats, and on our skill at prospering and making ourselves comfortable wherever we are -- in a meadow, in a desert, on the tundra, or out on the ocean -- we don't just adapt to places, or modify them in order to ease our burdens. We're the only species that over and over again has deliberately transformed our surroundings in order to stretch our capacity for understanding and provoke new accomplishments. And our growing and enhanced understanding is our most valuable, and our most vulnerable, inheritance. ↗

— Tony Hiss

#evolution #expansion #growth #humanity #intergenerational