Quotes about Understanding

If God were a theory, the study of theology would be the way to understand Him. But God is alive and in need of love and worship. This is why thinking of God is related to our worship. In an analogy of artistic understanding, we sing to Him before we are able to understand Him. We have to love in order to know. Unless we learn how to sing, unless we know how to love, we will never learn to understand Him.

The surest way to suppress our ability to understand the meaning of God and the importance of worship is to take things for granted...Indifference to the sublime wonder of living is the root of sin.

The principle to be kept in mind is to know what we see rather than to see what we know.

Only those will apprehend religion who can probe its depth, who can combine intuition and love with the rigor of method.

Mankind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation. The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living . What we lack is not a will to believe but a will to wonder.

We may not know whether our understanding is correct, or whether our sentiments are noble, but the air of the day surrounds us like spring which spreads over the land without our aid or notice.

The surest way of misunderstanding revelation is to take it literally, to imagine that God spoke to the prophet on a long-distance telephone. Yet most of us succumb to such fancy, forgetting that the cardinal sin in thinking about ultimate issues is literal-mindedness.

Usually we regard as meaningful that which can be expressed, and as meaningless that which cannot be expressed. Yet, the equation of the meaningful and the expressible ignores a vast realm of human experience, and is refuted by our sense of the ineffable which is an awareness of an allusiveness to meaning without the ability to express it.

Happy is he who is aware of the mysteries of his Lord.

The most incomprehensible fact is that we comprehend at all.

This is the status of the Bible in modern life: it is a sublime answer, but we do not know the question any more. Unless we recover the question, there is no hope of understanding the Bible.

The creatures of the earth think of Him as being on high, declaring, 'His glory is above the heavens' (Psalms 113:4), while the heavenly beings think of Him as being below, declaring, 'His glory is over all the earth? (Psalms 57:12), until they both, in heaven and on earth concur in declaring, Blessed be the glory of the Lord from his place,' because He is unknowable and no one can truly understand Him.