#understanding

At the same time it offered the hope, as it still does, that improved understanding could better the lot of mankind. For me, growing up in the 1930s, the two motivations powerfully reinforced each other. ↗

— James Tobin

#could #does #each #growing #growing up

The older you get, the more you understand how your conscience works. The biggest and only critic lives in your perception of people's perception of you rather than people's perception of you. ↗

— Criss Jami

#biggest #confidence #conscience #control #critic

Language, she said, was just our way to explain away the wonder and glory of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss. She said people can't deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it can't be explained and understood. ↗

— Chuck Palahniuk

#language #understanding #wonder #world #beauty

O how incomprehensible everything was, and actually sad, although it was also beautiful. One knew nothing. One lived and ran about the earth and rode through forests, and certain things looked so challenging and promising and nostalgic: a star in the evening, a blue harebell, a reed-green pond, the eye of a person or a cow. And sometimes it seemed that something never seen yet long desired was about to happen, that a veil would drop from it all, but then it passed, nothing happened, the riddle remained unsolved, the secret spell unbroken, and in the end one grew old and looked cunning . . . or wise . . . and still one knew nothing perhaps, was still waiting and listening. ↗

— Hermann Hesse

#literature #philosophy #understanding #beauty

No one could possibly understand my purest feelings but I couldn't care less; My deepest yearnings are nobody's goddamn business anyway ↗

— Novala Takemoto

#business

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects and our heats? Can the writer renew our hope for literary forms? Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power? ↗

— Annie Dillard

#reading #understanding #writing #writing-life #beauty

The belief that the animals exist because God created them - and that he created them so we can better meet our needs - is contrary to our scientific understanding of evolution and, of course, to the fossil record, which shows the existence of non-human primates and other animals millions of years before there were any human beings at all. ↗

— Peter Singer

#because #before #beings #belief #better

If you take the contempt some Americans have for yuppies and multiply it by 10 you might come close to understanding their attitude towards the City, as they call it - London, the people of the south. ↗

— Martin C. Smith

#call #city #close #come #contempt

In particular, people have trouble understanding where I stand in relation to my characters, and very often this gets reduced to me making vicious fun of them. ↗

— Todd Solondz

#fun #gets #i #making #me

In Connecticut, my understanding, although I haven't seen the actual litigation, is that they want to measure every other year and not provide annual assessment as is required in the statute. ↗

— Margaret Spellings

#although #annual #assessment #connecticut #every