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If you understand, things are just as they are. If you do not understand, things are just as they are.
--
“The Forever Trees”, p. 327 (quoting a Zen saying)

 

Charles de Lint

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What makes a subject difficult to understand — if it is significant, important — is not that some special instruction about abstruse things is necessary to understand it. Rather it is the contrast between the understanding of the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things that are most obvious can become the most difficult to understand. What has to be overcome is not difficulty of the intellect but of the will.

 

Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

Before we can try to remould society intelligently, we must understand its functioning; we must realise that, even when we believe that we understand it, we may be mistaken. What we must learn to understand is that human civilisation has a life of its own, that all our efforts to improve things must operate within a working whole which we cannot entirely control, and the operation of whose forces we can hope merely to facilitate and assist so far as we can understand them.

 

Friedrich Hayek

 

Nor is there any embarrassment in the fact that we're ridiculous, isn't it true? For it's actually so, we are ridiculous, light-minded, with bad habits, we're bored, we don't know how to look, how to understand, we're all like that, all, you, and I, and they! Now, you're not offended when I tell you to your face that you're ridiculous? And if so, aren't you material? You know, in my opinion it's sometimes even good to be ridiculous, if not better: we can the sooner forgive each other, the sooner humble ourselves; we can't understand everything at once, we cant start right out with perfection! To achieve perfection, one must first begin by not understanding many things! And if we understand too quickly, we may not understand well. This I tell you, you, who have already been able to understand. .. and not understand ... so much. I'm not afraid for you now;

 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

The very things I might have given in to, that demanded, that said, this is your life. I mean, this is your only way to survive, are the things I fought hardest to end. 'Cause I believed in something else. And um, what makes that sane is that I can understand other people's situations in their own terms, but I still can't understand mine.

 

Edie Sedgwick

 

It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. Human understanding has vulgarly occupied itself with nothing but understanding, but if it would only take the trouble to understand itself at the same time it would simply have to posit the paradox.

 

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

 

Dear premies, I guess this is the last night of this festival, of this Guru Puja and really, what have we understood? Really, in one way, what can we understand? What is there to understand? And it's just like sometimes you just feel, Understand? When I use the word understand ... But there is nothing to understand! And if there is something to understand, there is only one thing to understand, and that is to surrender!

 

Maharaji (Prem Rawat)