Richard M. Weaver Quotes

If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching.

But history is neither watchmaking nor cabinet construction. It is an endeavor toward better understanding.

Cognition is not fighting, but once someone knows a lot, he will have much to fight for, so much that he will be called a relativist because of it.

We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.

Sometimes you need to be aware of the bigger picture you are missing.

History is our guide, and without a knowledge of history, we are lost!

I would have offered you a forest of truth, but you wish to speak of a single leaf

‎Be careful not to keep your eyes glued to detail. Stand far enough away to get a perspective of the whole.

You can't see the forest for the trees.

He to whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the age in which he lives.

I wanted to understand things and then be free of them. I needed to learn how to telescope things, ideas. Things were too big to see all at once, like all the books in the library-everything laying around on all the tables. You might be able to put it all into one paragraph or into one verse of a song if you could get it right.

A man sees only what concerns him.... How much more, then, it requires different intentions of the eye and of the mind to attend to different departments of knowledge! How differently the poet and the naturalist look at objects!

The more one knows, the more one simplifies.

The truth isn't just the facts. You can have all the facts imaginable and miss the truth, just as you can have facts missing or some wrong, and reach the larger truth.

Is everyone who lives in Ignorance like you?" asked Milo. "Much worse," he said longingly. "But I don't live here. I'm from a place very far away called Context.

From whatever you wish to know and measure you must take your leave, at least for a time. Only when you have left the town can yousee how high its towers rise above the houses.

If a man cannot see a church, it is preposterous to take his opinion about its altar-piece or painted window.

We can only know others by ourselves.

I never am really satisfied that I understand anything; because, understand it well as I may, my comprehension can only be an infinitesimal fraction of all I want to understand about the many connections and relations which occur to me, how the matter in question was first thought of or arrived at, etc., etc.

No matter how intelligent a man is, he can't see what he doesn't know how to see.

Once you know the world you know how your character fits into it.

Book! You lie there; the fact is, you books must know your places. You'll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts.

The Fox knows many things-the hedgehog one big one.

Something gets lost when you translate. It's hard to keep straight. Perspective is every thing.

A man is wise with the wisdom of his time only, and ignorant with its ignorance.