Wisdom and understanding can only become the possession of individual men by travelling the old road of observation, attention, perseverance, and industry.
Samuel Smiles

Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason or imagination, rarely or never.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Until you understand a writer's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

An understanding of the natural world and what's in it is a source of not only a great curiosity but great fulfillment.
David Attenborough

I think you also understand that one of the key things that's got to be done in Iraq is to build a mentality of understanding that the military needs to be subordinate to civilian control and respectful of its own people.
John Abizaid

We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction.
Stephen Jay Gould

Be patient and understanding. Life is too short to be vengeful or malicious.
Phillips Brooks

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.
Louis D. Brandeis

The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.
Audre Lorde

Once we realize that imperfect understanding is the human condition there is no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes.
George Soros

When God loves a creature he wants the creature to know the highest happiness and the deepest misery He wants him to know all that being alive can bring. That is his best gift. There is no happiness save in understanding the whole.
Thornton Wilder

And a third thing is the understanding of the Church as a community, a communion which is just a hierarchy but the people of God, whose servants are the priests and bishops.
Hans Kung

I have a problem when people say something's real or not real, or normal or abnormal. The meaning of those words for me is very personal and subjective. I've always been confused and never had a clearcut understanding of the meaning of those kinds of words.
Tim Burton

I am very sure that any man of common understanding may, by culture, care, attention, and labor, make himself what- ever he pleases, except a great poet.
Lord Chesterfield

Any affectation whatsoever in dress implies, in my mind, a flaw in the understanding.
Lord Chesterfield

I owe much to mother. She had an expert's understanding, but also approached art emotionally.
David Rockefeller

Acting is something different to everybody. I just know that if you watch an actor or actress getting better and better, I think that's them just understanding themselves better and better.
Cameron Diaz

So basically the understanding on these so-called reissues is that they were done behind my back, without my permission, and the band informed me that I would no longer be paid on them at all.
Jello Biafra

The question really is how do we get Embassy Officers into the minds of the American business community. That is a much more difficult task than understanding a statistical matrix.
Lawrence Eagleburger

It is vain to talk of the interest of the community, without understanding what is the interest of the individual.
Jeremy Bentham