grasping the essence Quotes

I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

You cannot be known Better than I know you.

Grasping the structure of a subject is understanding it in a way that permits many other things to be related to it meaningfully. To learn structure in short, is to learn how things are related.

Things and men have always a certain sense, a certain side by which they must be got hold of if one wants to obtain a solid grasp and a perfect command.

We see nothing till we truly understand it.

It is better to understand a part of truth and apply it to our lives than to understand nothing at all and flounder helplessly in a vain attempt to pierce the mystery of existence.

I understand what something short should be like. I understand beauty in that form. If I start extending, somehow I kind of lose my bearings.

The danger is that in reaction to abuses and distortions of an idea, we'll reject it completely. And in the process miss out on the good of it, the worth of it, the truth of it.

The front aspect of great thoughts can only be enjoyed by those who stand on the side whence they arrive.

What I lacked [in La Nausee] was a sense of reality. I have changed since. I have slowly learned to experience reality.

To understand is to possess the thing understood, first by sympathy and then by intelligence.

As I drift back into sleep, I can't help thinking that it's a wonderful thing to be right about the world. To weigh the evidence, always incomplete, and correctly intuit the whole, to see the world in a grain of sand, to recognize its beauty, its simplicity, its truth. It's as close as we get to God in this life, and reside in the glow of such brief flashes of understanding, fully awake, sometimes for two or three seconds, at peace with our existence. And then back to sleep we go.