#under

In rereading one of the best essays I know on Dante's Paradiso, Giovanni Getto's "Aspetti della poesia di Dante" (Aspects of Dante's Poetry, 1947), one can see that there is not one single image of Paradise that does not stem from a tradition that was part of the medieval reader's heritage, I won't say of ideas, but of daily fantasies and feelings. It is from the biblical tradition and the church fathers that these radiances come from, these vortices of flame, these lamps, these suns, these brilliances and brightnesses emerging "like a horizon clearing" (Par. 14.69)...For medieval man, reading about this light and luminosity was equivalent to when we dream about the sinuous gracefulness of a movie star, the elegant lines of a car...It is this appeal to a poetry of understanding that can make the Paradiso fascinating even for the modern reader who has lost the reference points familiar to his medieval counterpart. ↗

— Umberto Eco

#poetry-of-understanding #dreams

I don't even pretend we can occupy the Lib Dem holier-than-thou, hands-entirely-clean-and-entirely-empty-type stance. No, we are getting our hands dirty, and inevitably and totally understandably we are being accused of being just like any other politicians. ↗

— Nick Clegg

#any #being #dirty #even #getting

I say this as a young dad seeing children going into primary school: I don't think we should underestimate the formative effect on a child of those first years in primary school. ↗

— Nick Clegg

#children #dad #effect #first #formative

I fall in love with contradictions without understanding. I can't really portray them unless I do. So in a roundabout way I have to fall in love, it's my duty. If love is about understanding and understanding is compassion and compassion is love, I have to have compassion towards the world. ↗

— Joseph Fiennes

#compassion #contradictions #duty #fall #i

It's perfectly okay if you don't understand every single one of them. For one thing, I make a lot of corny jokes, and you have to be 40 years old to get some of them. ↗

— Brian P. Cleary

#every #get #i #jokes #lot

I do not understand the capricious lewdness of the sleeping mind. ↗

— John Cheever

#i #i do #mind #sleeping #understand

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony. ↗

— John Cheever

#american #american writer #ball #ceremony #describe

No psychologist should pretend to understand what he does not understand... Only fools and charlatans know everything and understand nothing. ↗

— Anton Chekhov

#does #everything #fools #know #nothing

Being called ugly and fat and disgusting to look at from the time I could barely understand what the words meant has scarred me so deep inside that I have learned to hunt, stalk, claim, own and defend my own loveliness. ↗

— Margaret Cho

#being #called #claim #could #deep

War is mainly a catalogue of blunders. ↗

— Winston Churchill

#catalogue #mainly #war