Broad Understanding Quotes

The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step outside the frame.

I tried to fit it in with some previous broad conceptual understanding of some part of mathematics that would clarify the particular problem I was thinking about.

The wise man knows of all things, as far as possible, although he has no knowledge of each of them in detail

I don't read such small stuff as letters, I read men and nations. I can see through a millstone, though I can't see through a spelling-book. What a narrow idea a reading qualification is for a voter!

I believe strongly that philosophy has nothing to do with specialists.

I know a little about a lot of things. But I don't know a lot about everything.

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.

The purpose of a good education is to show you that there are three sides to a two-sided story.

The very quality of books to read and facts to master with which the twentieth-century man is confronted encourages him to think broadly and superficially about much, but hinders him from thinking deeply and thoroughly about anything.

Since we cannot be universal and know all that is to be known of everything, we ought to know a little about everything. For it is far better to know something about everything than to know all about one thing. This universality is the best. If we can have both, still better; but if we must choose, we ought to choose the former.

To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind: civilization implies the graceful relation of all varieties of experience to a central humane system of thought. The present age is peculiarly barbaric: introduce, say, a Hebrew scholar to an ichthyologist or an authority on Danish place names and the pair of them would have no single topic in common but the weather or the war (if there happened to be a war in progress, which is usual in this barbaric age).

An extensive knowledge is needful to thinking people-it takes away the heat and fever; and helps, by widening speculation, to ease the burden of the mystery.

You want to know a little about a lot.

Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world's a sage.

Philosophers ought to aspire to know lots of different things and to forge useful synthetic perspectives.

The simpler the message, the broader the meaning, in many respects.

There's a very famous Miyamoto Musashi quote. "Once you understand the way broadly, you can see it in all things." The idea is once you understand what excellence is all about, whether it's in painting, or carpentry or martial arts, that you see how that excellence manifests itself in any discipline. I think that all the different things that I do enhance all the other things that I do.

There is a danger one has to really be knowing much more because you can't be too narrow on science.

Every one of my opponents, every one of my critics, will tell you that I am a generalist spread far too thin in an age when this is not done anymore, when responsible knowledge is specialized knowledge.

Read things to not just know what's going on, but see it from different varying viewpoints.

Knowledge is indivisible. When people grow wise in one direction, they are sure to make it easier for themselves to grow wise in other directions as well. On the other hand, when they split up knowledge, concentrate on their own field, and scorn and ignore other fields, they grow less wise - even in their own field.

Even good opinions are worth very little unless we hold them in the broad, intelligent, and spacious way.