In-Depth Understanding Quotes

Better know nothing than half-know many things.

What I really don't like is oversimplification.

I do like people to read the books twice, because I write my novels about ideas which concern me deeply and I think are important, and therefore I want people to take them seriously. And to read it twice of course is taking it seriously.

A smattering of everything is worth little. It is a fallacy to suppose that an encyclopaedic knowledge is desirable. The mind is made strong, not through much learning, but by the thorough possession of something.

To understand one thing well is better than understanding many things by halves.

No more harmful nonsense exists than [the] common supposition that deepest insight into great questions about the meaning of life or the structure of reality emerges most readily when a free, undisciplined, and uncluttered (read, rather, ignorant and uneducated) mind soars above mere earthly knowledge and concern.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

Understand from top to bottom what the effort requires.

Do not hover always on the surface of things, nor take up suddenly with mere appearances; but penetrate into the depth of matters, as far as your time and circumstances allow, especially in those things which relate to your profession.

It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.

It is often said that Leonardo drew so well because he knew about things; it is truer to say that he knew about things because he drew so well.

More is got from one book on which the thought settles for a definite end in knowledge, than from libraries skimmed over by a wandering eye.

I don't always have the time I wish I had to understand something I don't understand. So I'm trying to do a little bit less of the quick pieces and a little bit more of the "here's how the Singaporean health care system works" kind of stuff, because to be good at my job, I have to keep learning. The thing that I fear the most is becoming one of those journalists who is still trying to apply the thinking of the decade in which they started three or four decades later.

To be master of any branch of knowledge, you must master those which lie next to it, and thus to know anything you must know all.

The hallmark of a deep explanation is that it answers more than you ask

It is necessary, in order to know things well, to know the particulars of them; and these, being infinite, make our knowledge eversuperficial and imperfect.

God is the only one who truly gets it because He knows the intimate ways of our minds and hearts.

Knowing a deep thing well, which is what science asks of its practitioners, is an empowerment that is very profound. It's a liberation.

We usually break the story first. For instance, on The Monuments Men, and this one is more complicated because there's a lot of history, so before we started, we sat down with Robert Edsel, the author of the book, for about a week, and basically, he just gave us a lecture and went through everything. And then, I had a researcher, somebody who we had actually used on Argo.

The more you know, the more unflinchingly you deny casual beliefs and Accepted Wisdom when it flies in the face of reality, the more carefully you observe the world and its people around you, the better chance you have of writing something meaningful and well-crafted.

I have a point of view on the issues, but it's a complex point of view that really can't be summed up in a sentence or two. I'm not being intentionally vague or mushy, it's just that - in my mind - the real answer is complicated.

Good questions outrank easy answers.

You have to be willing to totally immerse yourself in China in order to have in-depth exposure to China.

The lecturer who is full of his subject is usually very slow in emptying himself.

I do not approve the maxim which desires a man to know a little of everything. Superficial knowledge, knowledge without principles, is almost always useless and sometimes harmful knowledge.