In the case of complex personalities the matter stands thus: one of these can understand other men better than they can understand themselves, because within himself he has not only the character he is grasping, but also its opposite. Duality is necessary for observation and comprehension.
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pp. 109-110Otto Weininger
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So you must ask this question, put this question to yourself, whether your mind can be empty of all its past and yet retain the technological knowledge, your engineering knowledge, your linguistic knowledge, the memory of all that, and yet function from a mind that is completely empty. The emptying of that mind comes about naturally, sweetly without bidding, when you understand yourself, when you understand what you are. What you are is the memory, bundle of memories, experiences, thoughts. When you understand that, look at it, observe it; and when you observe it, see in that observation that there is no duality between the observer and the observed; then when you see that, you will see that your mind can be completely empty, attentive, and in that attention you can act wholly, without any fragmentation.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Many of our attempts to understand Christian faith have only cheapened it. I can no more understand the totality of God that the pancake I made for breakfast understands the complexity of me. The little we do understand, that grain of sand our minds are capable of grasping, those ideas such as God is good, God feels, God loves, God knows all, are enough to keep our hearts dwelling on His majesty and otherness forever.
Don Miller
As he went through the half-darkness of the lamp-lit streets, deserted almost entirely at this hour, he brooded over his hard luck. What chance had he ever been given? Raught, for that matter, like many another in case like his, was far from grasping fully how bad his luck had been, how little the chance that life had offered. Neglect and harshness had marked him in infancy; there had been nothing at any time to tell against the effect of them. But in all of the past that he remembered and could understand there had been more than enough to be stored up as matter for savage resentment, for the soul-sick criminal's conviction that he owes the world no more than such repayment as he can make in its own coin.
Edmund Clerihew Bentley
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)
As for The Mapp... I suspect it'll never get a US publication. It seemed to frighten US publishers. They don't seem to understand it.
That seems to point up a significant difference between Europeans and Americans:
A European says: I can't understand this, what's wrong with me? An American says: I can't understand this, what's wrong with him?
I make no suggestion that one side or other is right, but observation over many years leads me to believe it is true.Terry Pratchett
Weininger, Otto
Weiping, Cui
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