Quotes about Understanding

Instead of condemning people, let's try to understand them. Let's try to figure out why they do what they do. That's a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism; and it breeds sympathy, tolerance, and kindness. "To know all is to forgive all." As Dr. Johnson said: "God himself, sir, does not propose to judge man until the end of his days." Why should you and I?

It was said of Emerson that he was always willing to listen to any man, no matter how humble his station, because he felt he could learn something from every man he met.

Who can resist being around a person who suspends his thoughts in order to value yours?

Show respect for the other person's opinions. Never say, 'You're wrong.

Much of our problem is not, as is often said, that we have failed to get what is in our head down in our heart. Much of what hinders us is that we have had a lot of mistaken theology in our head and it has gotten down into our heart. And it is controlling our inner dynamics so that the head and heart cannot, even with the aid of the Word and the Spirit, pull one another straight.

If the Bible says something once, notice it but don't count it as a fundamental principle. If it says it twice, think about it twice. If it is repeated many times, then dwell on it and seek to understand it. What you want to believe from the Bible is its message on the whole and use it as a standard for interpreting the peripheral passages.

And when people sense that something is coming around the logical corner that they will not to be so, they often just refuse to carefully follow the argument. It's as common as sin, and a large part of it too.

Knowledge is a friend of faith, essential to faith and to our relationship with God in the spiritual life.

First, we must learn from him the reason why we live and why we do the things we do.

You know something when you are able to deal with it as it is on an appropriate basis of thought and experience.

Religion as actually lived, not as some figment of the academic imagination, always claims to involve knowledge of how things are.

"Mystery" means, in the language of the New Testament, something that had long remained hidden but then came to be known for the first time.