understanding

Many ask what difference does it make whether man believes in a God or not.It makes a big difference.It makes all the difference in the world.It is the difference between being right and being wrong; it is the difference between truth and surmises__acts or delusion.It is the difference between the earth being flat, and the earth being round.It is the difference between the earth being the center of the universe, or a tiny speck in this vast and uncharted sea of multitudinous suns and galaxies.It is the difference in the proper concept of life, or conclusions based upon illusion.It is the difference between verified knowledge and the faith of religion.It is a question of Progress or the Dark Ages.

A conversation in which the two parties have different beliefs should never begin with the intention of converting the other party to your own beliefs. Every worthwhile conversation's goal should be to understand the other person's opinions and help them understand your own.

I believe that only scientists can understand the universe. It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong.

Believe this, __he higher you go, the further you see_ and also __he further you see the clearer you hear; __he clearer you hear, the wiser you become_!

It could be that God has absconded but spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem.

I pity the man who praises God only when things go his way.

People always say that they want to understand so that they can believe. But in MY reality it__ just the opposite. I believe because I DON__ understand. I HAVE to believe, because there__ no other way to explain what I__ seeing, feeling, or experiencing.

It really is more natural to believe a preternatural story, that deals with things we don__ understand, than a natural story that contradicts things we do understand. Tell me that the great Mr Gladstone, in his last hours, was haunted by the ghost of Parnell, and I will be agnostic about it. But tell me that Mr Gladstone, when first presented to Queen Victoria, wore his hat in her drawing-room and slapped her on the back and offered her a cigar, and I am not agnostic at all. That is not impossible; it__ only incredible. But I__ much more certain it didn__ happen than that Parnell__ ghost didn__ appear; because it violates the laws of the world I do understand.

For the merest moment I couldn't breathe. Something inside me quivered, some oud string plucked by his words, and if I breathed it would stop.He did not know the truth of me, yet he had perceived something true about me that no one else had ever noticed. And in spite of that__r perhaps because of it__e believed me good, believed me worth taking seriously, and his belief, for one vertiginous moment, made me want to be better than I was.

When I find that stubbornness continually overrides common sense regardless of the logic of my argument, it seems that the only effective solution is to tell them to go ahead and stick their finger in the socket. And what I find is that what my argument failed to solve, electricity does quite nicely.

Some of us manage to think bigger, brighter, deeper thoughts. Some of these thoughts already shape the kind of research we do. Some of them will prove to be right, and our understanding of our home will deepen. Our home, one day, will be less of a mystery to us.

We are told we must choose _ the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the

Belief gets in the way of learning.

Lastly, and doubtless always, but particularly at the end of the last century, certain scholars considered that since the appearances on our scale were finally the only important ones for us, there was no point in seeking what might exist in an inaccessible domain. I find it very difficult to understand this point of view since what is inaccessible today may become accessible tomorrow (as has happened by the invention of the microscope), and also because coherent assumptions on what is still invisible may increase our understanding of the visible.

What has been done is little__carcely a beginning; yet it is much in comparison with the total blank of a century past. And our knowledge will, we are easily persuaded, appear in turn the merest ignorance to those who come after us.

Whoever gains good understanding, keeps God's commandment.

The future of the next generation relies on astronomers obtaining a full understanding ofthe rapidly changing human environmental conditions and the halting of biologically toxic corporategovernment policies. The overloading of the electromagnetic environment is one of these disastrouspolicies that must stop.

The journey of the mind always has longer to travel than the heart because dreams carry weight, while love makes you float.