A collection of quotes on the topic of understanding, doing, people, use.
“The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.”
“Those who know, do. Those that understand, teach.”
This and many similar quotes with the same general meaning are misattributed to Aristotle as a result of Twitter attribution decay. The original source of the quote remains anonymous. The oldest reference resides in the works of George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903): "Maxims for Revolutionists", where he claims that “He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.”. However, the related quote, "Those who can, do. Those who understand, teach" likely originates from Lee Shulman in his explanation of Aristotlean views on professional mastery: Source: Shulman, L. S. (1986). Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching. Educational Researcher, 15(2), 4 - 14. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1175860
Misattributed
Variant: Those who can, do, those who cannot, teach.
“To understand is to forgive.”
“There's nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.”
“As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.”
“Don't criticize what you can't understand.”
“You always admire what you really don't understand.”
“I love a lot of people, understand none of them…”
Source: The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
Interpretation of a Japanese interview, as quoted in the same The New York Times-article linked above, published 4 January 2018.
Other quotes, 2018
“Modern paintings are like women, you'll never enjoy them if you try to understand them. ”
Source: The Mark of Athena
Variant: When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.
Teacher
Statement to the press (23 November 1991), the day before his death, as quoted at The Biography Channel http://www.thebiographychannel.co.uk/biography_story/338:294/1/Freddie_Mercury.htm.
Quoted in David Carr, "Been Up, Been Down. Now? Super." http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/movies/20carr.html?_r=4&pagewanted=2&8dpc&oref=slogin&, New York Times (2008-04-20)
“The beginning of purpose is found in creating something that only you understand.”
Autobiography of A.T. Still, page 253.
The Third Notebook: Part Two
No Longer Human
As quoted in Our Precarious Habitat (1973) by Melvin A. Benarde, p. v
Source: The Metamorphosis (1915)
Source: 1940s, A History of Western Philosophy (1945)
Response to Harold Bell, question about his view on friendship in an Interview (video) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InSFYdFaS3E.
“Just as women's bodies are softer than men's, so their understanding is sharper.”
My Inventions (1919)
Context: While I have not lost faith in its potentialities, my views have changed since. War can not be avoided until the physical cause for its recurrence is removed and this, in the last analysis, is the vast extent of the planet on which we live. Only though annihilation of distance in every respect, as the conveyance of intelligence, transport of passengers and supplies and transmission of energy will conditions be brought about some day, insuring permanency of friendly relations. What we now want most is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth and the elimination of that fanatic devotion to exalted ideals of national egoism and pride, which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife. No league or parliamentary act of any kind will ever prevent such a calamity. These are only new devices for putting the weak at the mercy of the strong.
Source: Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue, Book 1
Reported in Patti Denys, Mary Holmes, Animal Magnetism: At Home With Celebrities & Their Animal Companions (1998), p. 106
Source: Jane Goodall: 40 Years at Gombe
2015-11-17, vowing to retaliate against the Islamic militants responsible for the destruction of a Russian airliner over the Sinai on October 31, 2015. Tribune India, http://www.tribuneindia.com/news/nation/russians-up-strikes-in-french-fury/159736.html (17 November 2015)
2011 - 2015
Written by Joseph Goebbels and Mjölnir, Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken (Munich: Verlag Frz. Eher, 1932).Translated as “Those Damned Nazis: Why a Workers Party?
“Those Damn Nazis: Why Are We a Workers’ Party?” https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/haken32.htm written by Joseph Goebbels and Mjölnir, Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken, Nazi propaganda pamphlet (Munich: Verlag Frz. Eher, 1932)
1930s
Love is a Radiant Light: The Life & Words of Saint Charbel (2019)
Der Spiegel (17 October 1988)
This is often attributed to George Orwell book 1984. We cannot find it inside. Perharps this is post-mortem paraphrase of his quote "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past".
“How can we resist exploitation if we don’t have the tools to understand exploitation?”
Source: Half of a Yellow Sun
Source: https://sheleadsafrica.org/20-powerful-chimamanda-adichie-quotes-for-todays-boss-women/
“Physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an attempt by an atom to understand itself.”
Source: Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos
“Science and religion are not at odds. Science is simply too young to understand.”
Source: Angels & Demons
Remarks in Arlington, Virginia http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1987/092587b.htm (25 September 1987)
1980s, Second term of office (1985–1989)
As quoted in Stories in His Own Hand: The Everyday Wisdom of Ronald Reagan (2001) https://books.google.com/books?id=9ut8fnmwVkwC&pg=PA91 edited by Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Graebner Anderson, and Martin Anderson. p. 91
Post-presidency (1989–2004)
From interview with Malavika Sangghvi
Muhammad Kulayni, Usūl al-Kāfī - The Book of Intellect and Ignorance.
Regarding Knowledge & Wisdom, General
Habermas (1979) cited in: Werner Ulrich (1983) Critical heuristics of social planning. p. 123
Last speech to parliament, December 24, 1545.
English Church History from the Death of King Henry VII to the Death of Archbishop Parker, Rev. Alfred Plummer, 1905, Edinburg, T. & T. Clark, p. 85. http://books.google.com/books?id=ofMOAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA85&dq=%22+you+be+permitted+to+read+holy+scriptures%22
History of the Indies (1561)
"Ever Since New York", written by Harry Styles, Mitch Rowland, Jeff Bhasker, Ryan Nasci, Alex Salibian, Tyler Johnson
Lyrics, Harry Styles (2017)
Grigory Rasputin in a letter to the Tsarina Alexandra, 7 Dec 1916
Quoted in: Yanqing Vanessa Ong et al. Memories unfolded: a guide to memories at Old Ford Factory, 2008, p. 50
Quoted regarding his advisor.Few men in history would be so frank and honest with their monarch and when Weizheng died, Taizong was overwhelmed with grief. The Emperor said to his ministers,
“The more you use it, the more it produces;
the more you talk of it, the less you understand.”
Source: Tao Te Ching, Ch. 5, as interpreted by Stephen Mitchell (1992)
Context: The Tao is like a bellows:
it is empty yet infinitely capable.
The more you use it, the more it produces;
the more you talk of it, the less you understand.
“Photography is not only an art, it is an international language that everybody understands.”
Amasi Program, Sharjah TV Interview (March 1, 2016)
Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 217
“My top priority is for people to understand that they have the power to change things themselves.”
Source: Ender's Game
“Don’t criticize what you don’t understand, son. You never walked in that man’s shoes.”
Variant: Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.
Source: Thirst
“I understand, and not knowing how to express myself without pagan words, I’d rather remain silent”
Source: A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat
“Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.”
Reply, according to Dr. Felix T. Smith of Stanford Research Institute, to a physicist friend who had said "I'm afraid I don't understand the method of characteristics," as quoted in The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics (1979) by Gary Zukav, Bantam Books, p. 208, footnote.
“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”
- Chinese proverb”
“You have to know the past to understand the present.”
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
ii. America: The Pueblo Indians http://books.google.com/books?id=w6vUgN16x6EC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Jung+Memories+Dreams+and+Reflections&hl=en&sa=X&ei=LLxKUcD0NfSo4APh0oDABg&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false (Extract from an unpublished ms) (Random House Digital, 2011).
Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963)
Context: We always require an outside point to stand on, in order to apply the lever of criticism. This is especially so in psychology, where by the nature of the material we are much more subjectively involved than in any other science. How, for example, can we become conscious of national peculiarities if we have never had the opportunity to regard our own nation from outside? Regarding it from outside means regarding it from the standpoint of another nation. To do so, we must acquire sufficient knowledge of the foreign collective psyche, and in the course of this process of assimilation we encounter all those incompatibilities which constitute the national bias and the national peculiarity. Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. I understand England only when I see where I, as a Swiss, do not fit in. I understand Europe, our greatest problem, only when I see where I as a European do not fit into the world. Through my acquaintance with many Americans, and my trips to and in America, I have obtained an enormous amount of insight into the European character; it has always seemed to me that there can be nothing more useful for a European than some time or another to look out at Europe from the top of a skyscraper. When I contemplated for the first time the European spectacle from the Sahara, surrounded by a civilization which has more or less the same relationship to ours as Roman antiquity has to modem times, I became aware of how completely, even in America, I was still caught up and imprisoned in the cultural consciousness of the white man. The desire then grew in me to carry the historical comparisons still farther by descending to a still lower cultural level.
On my next trip to the United States I went with a group of American friends to visit the Indians of New Mexico, the city-building Pueblos...
“In order to understand, I destroyed myself.”
A Factless Autobiography, Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 73
The Book of Disquiet
Original: Para compreender, destruí-me.
"Good Sense" in a dialogue between Free Hope, Old Church, Good Sense, and Self -Poise. p. 127.
Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 (1844)
Context: All around us lies what we neither understand nor use. Our capacities, our instincts for this our present sphere are but half developed. Let us confine ourselves to that till the lesson be learned; let us be completely natural; before we trouble ourselves with the supernatural. I never see any of these things but I long to get away and lie under a green tree and let the wind blow on me. There is marvel and charm enough in that for me.
“You teach me, I forget. You show me, I remember. You involve me, I understand.”
Press Conference, September 1 1992 http://www.mark-weeks.com/chess/92fs$$.htm
1990s
For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Nation and Culture
Source: On Coalition Government (1945)
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJodTuDeoYg
referring to his colleagues in the European Council
Jean-Claude Juncker, quoted by Dirk Von Kock 'Die Brüsseler Republik' http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-15317086.html in Der Spiegel (2000), then by Florian Eder 'Junckers Tricks in den langen Brüsseler Nächten' http://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article112948572/Junckers-Tricks-in-den-langen-Bruesseler-Naechten.html in Die Welt (2012).
1999
Source: Democracy: The God That Failed (2001), P.173
“When we understand this we see clearly that the subject round which the alternative senses play must be twofold. And we must therefore consider the subject of this work [the Divine Comedy] as literally understood, and then its subject as allegorically intended. The subject of the whole work, then, taken in the literal sense only is "the state of souls after death" without qualification, for the whole progress of the work hinges on it and about it. Whereas if the work be taken allegorically, the subject is "man as by good or ill deserts, in the exercise of the freedom of his choice, he becomes liable to rewarding or punishing justice."”
Hiis visis, manifestum est quod duplex oportet esse subiectum circa quod currant alterni sensus. Et ideo videndum est de subiecto huius operis, prout ad litteram accipitur; deinde de subiecto, prout allegorice sententiatur. Est ergo subiectum totius operis, litteraliter tantum accepti, status animarum post mortem simpliciter sumptus. Nam de illo et circa illum totius operis versatur processus. Si vero accipiatur opus allegorice, subiectum est homo, prout merendo et demerendo per arbitrii libertatem iustitie premiandi et puniendi obnoxius est.
Letter to Can Grande (Epistle XIII, 23–25), as translated by Charles Singleton in his essay "Two Kinds of Allegory" published in Dante Studies 1 (Harvard University Press, 1954), p. 87.
Epistolae (Letters)
Conclusion in Wonders of the Universe - Destiny
Nahj al-Balagha
If Prison Walls Could Speak (1972)
“It’s about understanding! Understanding the world!”
Explaining what led him to study theoretical physics, as quoted by Ian Sample, in The god of small things http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/nov/17/sciencenews.particlephysics, The Guardian, Saturday 17 November 2007.
Interviewed by the "Chicago SEED", November 1968
Letter to Catherine L. Moore (7 February 1937), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 407-408
Non-Fiction, Letters
Source: A Sincere Admonition to All Christians to Guard Against Insurrection and Rebellion (1522), p. 65
Quoted in Sharon Tate and the Manson Murders (2000), by Greg King
Babur writing about the battle against the Rajput Confederacy led by Maharana Sangram Singh of Mewar. In Babur-Nama, translated into English by A.S. Beveridge, New Delhi reprint, 1979, pp. 547-572.
