understanding

The aim is to love God because the pure heart loves loving God and because the true mind knows He deserves it. Unlike the accusations and beliefs of the critics and skeptics, it is neither an obligation of duty; nor a fear of damnation; nor a wish for power; nor a desire to appear more righteous than others; nor because God needs it; but because through all love, truth, reason, faith, honesty, and joy in and beyond oneself and the universe, He is worthy.

To learn is not to know; there are the learners and the learned. Memory makes the one, philosophy the others.

Beautiful moments in life need no words for description. Living those moments and feeling the beauty suffices.

To understand even remotely the holy omnipotence of God is to understand at least from mostly to wholly the magnificence of Christ.

Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! 'Have courage to use your own reason!'- that is the motto of enlightenment.

Dishonesty is not only the destroyer of beauty, but of what beauty creates, even out of ugliness - understanding. Dishonesty is the extinguisher of understanding, and understanding is the foundation of compassion.

I have a friend who's an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say "look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. Then he says "I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing," and I think that he's kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is ... I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it's not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there's also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts.

In the new quiet I heard the sea as if my ears were laid against the ocean floor. I could hear everything. The rumbling earthquake of a ship and spider crabs moving between weeds.

The fact that neither of us made sense was the beauty of it.

Language, she said, was just our way to explain away the wonder and glory of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss. She said people can't deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it can't be explained and understood.

When you__e a kid, you don__ think about big stuff that could change your life. You think about small things that might terrify you __ike a bad report card or missing a goal in front of all your friends or your friends no longer wanting to play with you. Because that's the biggest stuff you know. The biggest disappointments are all tied to this small little universe of yours, because bigger things cannot fit into a small universe. If you wanted bigger things in there you needed to have more room __r make more room. Perhaps you thought about your parents or your pets dying, which was rare. But all you knew was you would be terribly sad and lonely. And on those occasions when people or pets actually died, someone usually came along and distracted you from feeling too much of your actual feelings. Grownups did that __hey never left you alone to feel alone or think alone too much. They tended to think you are too small to know how to think and feel in big heaps, so they took parts of your heap onto themselves. To help _ but in the long run __t doesn__ help at all. Because if you do not see, or feel or think, or taste the bitter things in life, you don__ know they exist. You have not seen enough of the world to know how terrible it could be. And unfortunately for Sam, this inability to process change persisted into adulthood.

After all relationships had sell-by dates. Sometimes, the ones with the most passion were the ones to burn out faster. Others had a sweet and long-winding coil which burned with slow amicability. At times, it was true, people rekindled a dying ember with a new flame. But they hardly ever noticed the rekindling had come after some time of estrangement - whether physical or emotional. Because people needed newness to make a thing last indefinitely. To make it really last. And because Jan didn't like letting people go, she knew to look for the signs of love's waning. So she could tell how to ease it down slowly into its grave and keep her lovers as friends. Because she really believed people were meant to cross paths. People were meant to stay in your life. There was a reason for all encounters. And relationships had to be cosseted, no matter their shelf life. But they had to be allowed to change shape and form. It had to be given space to grow into something different.

A bitter critic is the sweetest corrector.

Curiosity__sking questions__sn__ just a way of understanding the world. It__ a way of changing it.

No matter what we think we should do, I don__ think you can coerce yourself into loving your neighbor__r your boss__hen you can__ stand him. But if you try to understand your feelings of dislike with mindfulness and compassion, being sure not to forget self-compassion, you create the possibility for change.

There is no perfection, only beautiful versions of brokenness.

Women invented misery, but we don't understand it.

Understanding why so many western women are giving birth to unnaturally large babies that either damage the birth canal or will not fit down it is one of the greatest challenges to modern medicine.