Top 100 Comprehensible Quotes
#1. The speaker must choose a comprehensible [verstandlich] expression so that speaker and hearer can understand one another.
Jurgen Habermas
#2. A church determined to hold only those doctrines that a secular world finds adequately comprehensible is a church that will hold to no central vital Christian teaching whatsoever.
Albert Mohler
#3. Sweetly, albeit hoarsely and with a burr, the girl started singing something scarcely comprehensible, but, judging by the women's faces in the stalls, very seductive:
Guerlain, Chanel no 5, Mitsuko, Narcissus noir, evening dresses, cocktail dresses..
Mikhail Bulgakov
#4. When Newton breached this philosophical barrier by rendering all motion comprehensible and predictable, some theologians criticized him for leaving nothing for the Creator to do.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#5. As we acquire knowledge, things do not become more comprehensible, but more mysterious.
Albert Schweitzer
#6. Look, life is only comprehensible through a thousand local gods ... spirits of certain trees, of certain curves of brick walls, of certain fish and chip shops if you like. And slate roofs, and frowns in people, and slouches ... I'd say to them, Worship all you can see, and more will appear ...
Peter Shaffer
#7. Finally, a principal reason for the lack of attention to "unclean spirits" and Jesus' "acts of power" in the Gospel stories is surely the modern "scientific" frame of mind that developed in the wake of the Enlightenment reduction of reality to what was natural and comprehensible by reason.
Richard A. Horsley
#8. Goodwin has done the seemingly impossible-he has made economics comprehensible and funny.
Joel Bakan
#9. Not a word, not a word of love, Prehaps, she thought, he does not love in the ordinary way. God loves us, after all, He manifests it in cancer, cholera, Siamese twins. Not all forms of love are comprehensible, and some forms of love destroy what they touch.
Hilary Mantel
#10. People gravitate toward products that are bold, but instantly comprehensible: Most Advanced Yet Acceptable--MAYA.
Derek Thompson
#11. Humor, to be comprehensible to anybody, must be built upon a foundation with which he is familiar. If he can't see the foundation the superstructure is to him merely a freak
like the Flatiron building without any visible means of support
something that ought to be arrested.
Mark Twain
#12. An API that isn't comprehensible isn't usable.
James Gosling
#13. My chief reason for choosing Christianity was because the mysteries were incomprehensible. What's the point of revelation if we could figure it out ourselves? If it were wholly comprehensible, then it would just be another philosophy.
Mortimer Adler
#14. All interpretation, all psychology, all attempts to make things comprehensible, require the medium of theories, mythologies, and lies.
Hermann Hesse
#15. We explain by means of purely intellectual processes, but we understand by means of the cooperation of all the powers of the mind in comprehension. In understanding we start from the connection of the given, living whole, in order to make the past comprehensible in terms of it.
Wilhelm Dilthey
#16. At once he became an enigma. One side or the other of his nature was perfectly comprehensible; but both sides together were bewildering.
Jack London
#17. However much you knock at nature's door, she will never answer you in comprehensible words.
Ivan Turgenev
#18. The best of Donald Westlake's pseudonymous thrillers about Parker, the toughest burglar who ever lived ... Out of print for years and years, Butcher's Moon is the ultimate Parker novel, best read as an installment in the series as a whole but comprehensible and wholly satisfying on its own.
Terry Teachout
#19. If different systems don't merge in a comprehensible way, that's a flaw in our comprehension and not a flaw in one system or the other.
Marilynne Robinson
#20. The comprehensible slips away, is transformed; instead of possession one learns connection.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#21. What are the comprehensible terrors of man compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders of God!
Herman Melville
#22. These ideas are, perhaps, too far stretched; but still it must be acknowledged, that, by representing the Deity as so intelligible and comprehensible, and so similar to a human mind, we are guilty of the grossest and most narrow partiality, and make ourselves the model of the whole universe.
David Hume
#23. Theories were clean and convincing and comprehensible. Life was messy and full of nonsense.
Julian Barnes
#24. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless
Steven Weinberg
#25. Great works of art are only great because they are accessible and comprehensible to everyone.
Leo Tolstoy
#26. A man must cling to the belief that the incomprehensible is comprehensible; otherwise he would not try to fathom it.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#27. Crime fiction confirms our belief, despite some evidence to the contrary, that we live in a rational, comprehensible, and moral universe.
P.D. James
#28. Nature is such as to give rise to conscious beings with minds; and it is such as to be comprehensible to such beings. Ultimately therefore such beings should be comprehensible to themselves.
Thomas Nagel
#29. Fucking was comprehensible. Fucking was neat and fast and clean, even when it was messy. This was something else.
Seduction.
Kit Rocha
#30. It is even harder to realize that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.
Steven Weinberg
#31. The past believed in dates. And everyone's life consisted of dates, giving life a rhythm and sense of gradation, as if from the eminence of a date one could look back and down, and see the past itself. A clear, comprehensible past, divided up into squares of events, lines of paths taken.
Andrey Kurkov
#32. We should acknowledge God merciful, but not always for us comprehensible.
Charlotte Bronte
#33. The more comprehensible the universe becomes the more pointless it seems.
Steven Weinberg
#34. Theater is where you go to find out something new that you don't know. It goes through somebody's brain and comes out in a comprehensible way that is beautiful, that's really interesting.
D. A. Pennebaker
#35. Imagine a survivor of a failed civilization with only a tattered book on aromatherapy for guidance in arresting a cholera epidemic. Yet, such a book would more likely be found amid the debris than a comprehensible medical text.
James Lovelock
#36. I discovered that the study of past philosophers is of little use unless our own reality enters into it. Our reality alone allows the thinker's questions to become comprehensible.
Karl Jaspers
#37. A phenomenon must be to some extent comprehensible to be perceived at all.
William S. Burroughs
#38. Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.
Kenneth Tynan
#39. Why should Americans care about the Nazi back story in World War II? If you don't have the Nazi back story in World War II, World War II is simply not comprehensible.
Peter Bergen
#40. People believe Loose Change because it proposes a closed world: comprehensible, controllable, small. Despite the great evil which runs it, it is more companionable than the chaos which really governs our lives, a world without destination or purpose.
George Monbiot
#41. Dogs can't speak English. Nor any human language - save, in one notable exception, Luxembourgish, which is only comprehensible to bankers and Luxembourgers, and therefore hardly of any use at all. No, you've eaten something disagreeable and are having a nightmare, that's all.
Ransom Riggs
#42. Among the members of these upper income groups are US academic economists, many of whom believe that the economy of the United States is working fairly well and, in particular, that it rewards talent and merit accurately and precisely. This is a very comprehensible human reaction.
Thomas Piketty
#43. History, as the study of the past, makes the coherence of what happened comprehensible by reducing events to a dramatic pattern and seeming them in a simple form.
Johan Huizinga
#44. Laws of motion of any kind only become comprehensible to man when he can examine arbitrarily selected units of that motion. But at the same time it is this arbitrary division of continuous motion into discontinuous units which give rise to a large proportion of human error.
Leo Tolstoy
#45. Love is not merely need alone, & what is more important is loving you, & making my true nature comprehensible to you.
Qiu Miaojin
#46. Go through what is comprehensible and you conclude that only the incomprehensible gives any light.
Saul Bellow
#47. No matter how complicated a problem is, it usually can be reduced to a simple, comprehensible form which is often the best solution.
An Wang
#48. My gift seems to be that I am able to tell a story in a comprehensible and engaging way.
Peter Coyote
#49. People to whom their daily life appears too empty and monotonous easily grow religious; this is comprehensible and excusable, only they have no right to demand religious sentiments from those whose daily life is not empty and monotonous.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#50. You can't make the incomprehensible comprehensible without losing it completely
Max Frisch
#51. Even weird breed of cat like Nazi Germany comprehensible to I Ching.
Philip K. Dick
#52. One sad consequence of this is that people don't feel permitted to try understand Internet infrastructure, so I'm really grateful to groups like Free Press and other nonprofits who are trying to make the issue urgent and comprehensible. And Andre Blum's book Tubes is great on this topic.
Astra Taylor
#53. Many performance poets seem to believe that yelling a poem makes it comprehensible. They are wrong.
Marilyn Nelson
#54. But the extraordinary insight which some persons are able to gain of others from indications so slight that it is difficult to ascertain what they are, is certainly rendered more comprehensible by the view here taken.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#56. In describing one way of going mad, I shall try to show that there is a comprehensible transition from the sane schizoid way of being-in-the-world to a psychotic way of being-in-the-world.
R.D. Laing
#57. Understanding does not cure evil, but it is a definite help, inasmuch as one can cope with a comprehensible darkness.
Carl Jung
#58. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible.
Umberto Eco
#59. All deeply good characters in imaginative literature, have to be, as it were, diluted with weakness or eccentricity; for only on such conditions are they comprehensible by readers and expressible by writers. Aldous Huxley
Nicholas Murray
#60. Older acquirers progress more quickly in early stages because they obtain more comprehensible input, while younger acquirers do better in the long run because of their lower affective filters.
Stephen D. Krashen
#61. It has taken us two million years to elevate politics from the level of a monkey squabble, to a level comprehensible to a six year old child.
Peter J. Carroll
#62. What we believe about God is the most important truth we believe, and it's the one truth that does the most to shape us. God is the Sun too bright for us to see. Jesus is the Prism who makes the colors beautiful and comprehensible.
Michael Spencer
#63. Art can no longer be merely a mirror, it must act as the organizer of the people's consciousness ... No form of representation is so readily comprehensible to the masses as photography.
El Lissitzky
#64. For me, I think the greatest achievements of science is to allow humanity to realize that our world is comprehensible. Through science, rational thinking, we can understand how the universe works.
Jim Al-Khalili
#65. When I began to dare to be clear, because I think clarity is the real risk in poetry because you are exposed. You're out in the open field. You're actually saying things that are comprehensible, and it's easy to criticize something you can understand.
Billy Collins
#66. I cannot imagine a context that would some day, in some manner, make the monstrous crime of September 11 an understandable or comprehensible political act.
Jurgen Habermas
#67. We should take comfort in two conjoined features of nature: first, that our world is incredibly strange and therefore supremely fascinating ... second, that however bizarre and arcane our world might be, nature remains potentially comprehensible to the human mind.
Stephen Jay Gould
#68. There would be a general reclaiming of fallen buttons and misplaced spectacles, of neighbors and kin, till time and error and accident were undone, and the world became comprehensible and whole.
Marilynne Robinson
#69. What immersion has taught us is that comprehensible subject-matter teaching is language teaching - the subject matter class is a language class if it is made comprehensible. In fact, the subject-matter class may even be better than the language class for language acquisition.
Stephen D. Krashen
#70. Life provides material for its agitation which makes its general views comprehensible to the masses.
Karl Radek
#71. It is much less important that the doctrine itself should be fully comprehensible. We believe that the sun is in the sky at midday in summer not because we can clearly see the sun (in fact, we cannot) but because we can see everything else.
C.S. Lewis
#72. The seasons and the years came and went ... and always ... one was, as the crow flies, about 2,000 km away - but from where? - and day by day hour by hour, with every beat of the pulse, one lost more and more of one's qualities, became less comprehensible to oneself, increasingly abstract.
W.G. Sebald
#73. Writing is more than just the making of a series of comprehensible statements: it is the gathering in of connotations; the harvesting of them, like blackberries in a good season, ripe and heavy, snatched from among the thorns of logic.
Fay Weldon
#74. The analyses ... often become too competent to be comprehensible ...
Avinash Dixit
#75. Doing battle with themselves that way, every day, all the time and sometimes it sucks, but other times it results in people making sort of a dream comprehensible to someone else.
Elliott Smith
#76. Ascension joy - inwardly we must become very quiet to hear the soft sound of this phrase at all. Joy lives in its quietness and incomprehensibility. This joy is in fact incomprehensible, for the comprehensible never makes for joy.1 Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#77. The senses are our bridge between the incomprehensible and the comprehensible.
August Macke
#78. History cannot be unwritten or written in the subjunctive, and the wholesale application of late twentieth-century values distorts the past and makes it less comprehensible.
Lawrence James
#79. I think the law should be comprehensible not only to those who work with it but also to those who are governed by it.
Alan Siegel
#80. If you're going to believe in God, if you're going to take that leap of faith, as I do, then the God that seems the most comprehensible to me would be the God who set us spinning and said 'Good luck.'
Roger Rosenblatt
#81. Poetry has never let me down. Without poetry, I would have found life less comprehensible, less bearable and infinitely less enjoyable.
Josephine Hart
#82. The idea of 'advice,' in terms of telling people advice or asking people for advice, has become not comprehensible to me, to a certain degree, due to feeling, like, for something to be accurately defined as 'good' or 'bad,' I would want to know the context, goal, perspective for it.
Tao Lin
#83. The revelatory or visionary is the province of the 'private' artist, who in order to render his personal world comprehensible or even tolerable, must force others to believe in it and therefore share it. It is said that 'the poet does not wish to be understood, but to be believed.
Kenneth Coutts-Smith
#84. Once the divinity we worshipped made itself visible and comprehensible, we crucified it.
George Bernard Shaw
#85. Remember that the divine order is intelligent and fundamentally good. Life is not a series of random, meaningless episodes, but an ordered, elegant whole that follows ultimately comprehensible laws.
Epictetus
#86. From the very fact the universe is on the whole orderly, in a manner comprehensible to our intellect, is evidence that we and it were fashioned by a common intelligence.
Philip Johnson
#87. It is not my intention to make anything comprehensible. I am of the opinion that there are sufficient paintings which one understands after a shorter or longer delay, and that therefore some incomprehensible painting would now be welcome. I am at pains to deliver such, as far as possible.
Rene Magritte
#88. Women don't require motives that are comprehensible to my intellectual processes.
(Nero Wolfe)
Rex Stout
#89. The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces.
Hannah Arendt
#90. I am told that the first comprehensible word I uttered as a child was 'home.'
Julie Andrews
#91. If Mere Christianity helps make Christianity comprehensible, Orthodoxy makes it weird again.
Leah Libresco
#92. This death cult has no reason and is beyond negotiation. This is what makes it so frightening. This is what causes so many to engage in a sort of mental diversion. They don't want to confront this horror. So they rush off in search of more comprehensible things to hate.
David Brooks
#93. Art must unquestionably have a social value; that is, as a potential means of communication it must be addressed, and in comprehensible terms, to the understanding of mankind.
Rockwell Kent
#94. The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings.
Martin Buber
#95. Leadership meant knowing how to distill complexity into a comprehensible message to reach the hearts as well as the minds of the larger world.
Jon Meacham
#96. For a man to strike any women is most brutal, and I, as well as everyone else, think this far worse than any attempt to shoot, which, wicked as it is, is at least more comprehensible and more courageous.
Queen Victoria
#97. One is reminded of Primo Levi's observation about the Holocaust: 'Things whose existence is not morally comprehensible cannot exist.
Michael Barnett
#98. I am an academic," said Professor Mandalay, "and thus have no finely developed senses that would be comprehensible to anyone who has not ever needed to grade papers without actually reading the blessed things.
Neil Gaiman
#99. fears based on stereotypes help make the world comprehensible.
Mark Stein
#100. Products have to be designed in a way that they are comprehensible.
Dieter Rams
