Partial Understanding Quotes

I think the intelligent thing about it is that you have to carefully listen to it all to grasp it, and because I'm not in every scene - colossal disappointment to everybody that it may be - I'm not getting the full picture here today while recording it.

There are mysteries which men can only guess at, which age by age they may solve only in part.

If we try to hold on to our partial glimpses of the divine, we cut it down to our own size and close our minds. Like it or nor, our human experience of anything or anybody is always incomplete: there is usually something that eludes us, some portion of experience that evades our grasp.

A little learning is a dangerous thing.

All my father saw was what he wanted to see.

Faith is a dynamic and ever-changing process, not some fixed body of truth that exists outside our world and our understanding. God's truth may be fixed and unchanging, but our comprehension of that truth will always be partial and flawed at best.

We need the self-confidence to admit that at best we possess only a partial understanding of the truth, which can be enlarged by refining our views in light of new arguments, new circumstances and new insights. But this requires us to listen to others, to weigh their arguments with care, and maybe even to learn from them.

A thought functions only as a fragmentary part in the formulation of an idea.

All error, not merely verbal, is a strong way of stating that the current truth is incomplete.

The judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth.

I think that no one individual can look at truth. It blinds you. You look at it and you see one phase of it. Someone else looks at it and sees a slightly awry phase of it. But taken all together, the truth is in what they saw though nobody saw the truth intact.

A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing.

... the besetting danger is not so much of embracing falsehood for truth, as of mistaking a part of the truth for the whole.

I shall often go wrong through defect of judgment. When right, I shall often be thought wrong by those whose positions will not command a view of the whole ground. I ask your indulgence for my own errors, which will never be intentional, and your support against the errors of others, who may condemn what they would not if seen in all its parts.

The existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality, and the other part that has not yet been understood is infinite.

Communication across the revolutionary divide is inevitably partial.

I strain to hear, but my old ears, for all their obscene hugeness, pick up nothing but snippets.

A little knowledge can go a long way.

The basic problem of the Christians in this country in the last eighty years or so, in regard to society and in regard to government, is that they have seen things in bits and pieces instead of totals.

Now with the allocation and the understanding of the lack of understanding, we enter into a new era of science in which we feel nothing more than so much so as to say that those within themselves, comporary or non-comporary, will figuratively figure into the folding of our non-understanding and our partial understanding to the networks of which we all draw our source and conclusions from.

The most disheartening tendency common among readers is to tear out one sentence from a work, as a criterion of the writer's ideas or personality.

Further, there are things of which the mind understands one part, but remains ignorant of the other; and when man is able to comprehend certain things, it does not follow that he must be able to comprehend everything.

A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.

It was as if I had worked for years on the wrong side of a tapestry, learning accurately all its lines and figures, yet always missing its color and sheen.

A lost trail always extends beyond the evidence, and even the trails we find are only fragments of the trails that lie beyond our comprehension.