Isaiah Berlin Quotes

Knowing is not understanding. There is a great difference between knowing and understanding: you can know a lot about something and not really understand it.

It is better to understand little than to misunderstand a lot.

Whatever you cannot understand, you cannot possess.

Once something becomes discernible, or understandable, we no longer need to repeat it. We can destroy it.

To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything.

A lot of the fun lies in trying to penetrate the mystery; and this is best done by saying over the lines to yourself again and again, till they pass through the stage of sounding like nonsense, and finally return to a full sense that had at first escaped notice.

Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.

There is a great difference between knowing and understanding: you can know a lot about something and not really understand it.

To make a discovery is not necessarily the same as to understand a discovery.

You can't change what you don't understand.

You don't have to be in "Who's Who" to know what's what.

Was not this ... what we spoke of as the great advantage of wisdom -- to know what is known and what is unknown to us?

We see nothing till we truly understand it.

Wise it is to comprehend the whole.

In many cases it is a matter for decision and not a simple matter of fact whether x understands y; and so on.

Knowledge, may it be said, is higher than magic and is more to be sought. It is quite possible to see what is happening and yet not know what is forward, for while seeing is believing, it does not follow that either seeing or believing is knowing.

Much learning does not teach understanding.

If you will read again what is written, you will see how it was.

There are clear cases in which 'understanding' literally applies and clear cases in which it does not apply; and these two sorts of cases are all I need for this argument.

If you don't know about it, you can't get it.

It is possible to interpret without observing, but not to observe without interpreting.

I'm just trying to understand what's around me as much as anyone else is, really. To draw a bead on a moving target.

Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.

Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye.

We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already.