Many seek to refute before they seek to understand. ![]() You don’t write because you want people to understand you, you write because you want to understand yourself. I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying. You can’t learn something if you’re scared of it. Understanding means throwing away your knowledge. ![]() 14th Dalai Lama (Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech, 1989) I pray for all of us, oppressor and friend, that together we succeed in building a better world through human understanding and love, and that in doing so we may reduce the pain and suffering of all sentient beings. ![]() Understanding and wisdom don’t come from thinking and reasoning, but from direct experience. Want more inner peace than 95% of people? If we don’t understand people, we don’t understand business. They should be made open to imagination and creativity. Understanding is more important than memorization! Schools should teach the students how to understand, think, doubt, and question. Have the patience to wait! Be still and allow the mud to settle. Trying to understand is like straining through muddy water. Those who don’t understand your silence, will never understand your words. The better you understand something, the more simply you can express it. O bliss of understanding, greater than the bliss of imagining or feeling. There are many people who know you, but very few who understand you. Happiness doesn’t require practice, only understanding. We get it anyway.To realize that you do not understand is a virtue not to realize that you do not understand is a defect. We may never know what the original coiners of understand had in mind, but that hasn't stopped us from making good use of it for over 1000 years. Another holds that Old English forstandan got mixed up with no-longer surviving synonyms for understand like undergetan (under get), underniman (under take), and underthencan (under think), but in that case it’s still not clear how those other words used under to relate to the idea of comprehension. One holds that the under- prefix also meant between or among, and to understand was to stand between things in order to separate and discern among them. Scholars have been arguing about the motivations for Germanic verbs of understanding for a long time now and plenty of explanations have been proposed. German verstehen, Dutch verstaan, and Scandinavian forstå are all related the Old English word, forstandan, which meant either “stand in front of” or “stand away/apart from.” This spatial arrangement has ties to another common metaphor that relates being able to see something with understanding (as in I see, or speculate, from Latin for “look at”) and to another that relates understanding to the idea of separating from ( discern, from Latin for “separate”). In the languages most closely related to English, the stand idea does come into play, but the words for understand have a different metaphor at work. Perceive comes from capere, “take hold of.” Many languages refer to these metaphors in their vocabulary of understanding.īut the “standing under” metaphor doesn’t seem to show up anywhere else. When we understand we “get it,” “catch the drift” or “get a handle on it.” The root of comprehend is the Latin prehendere, grasp. ![]() Most of our metaphors for understanding have to do with getting, grasping, or taking. What does “standing under” have to do with understanding? Still, it’s something of an etymological mystery. It comes directly from Old English, it’s composed of two simpler words, under and stand, and it’s had its current meaning, to comprehend, since our earliest records of it. Understand seems like a pretty straightforward English word.
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