Top 100 Must Be Understood Quotes
#1. For according to the outward man, we are in this world, and according to the inward man, we are in the inward world.... Since then we are generated out of both worlds, we speak in two languages, and we must be understood also by two languages.
Jakob Bohme
#2. It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.
Soren Kierkegaard
#3. True salvation always produces an abiding change of nature in a true convert. Therefore, whenever holiness of life does not accompany a confession of conversion, it must be understood that this individual is not a Christian.
Jonathan Edwards
#4. Life must be understood before getting old, most preferably, in youth!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#5. I am doing what I want to do - painting pictures people want and understand. I have no burning ambition to create the kind of 'art' which the confused critics praise for its 'plastic significance,' 'fluid lines,' and 'inner awareness,' or 'must be understood on three levels.
Arnold Friberg
#6. Life is something for which there is no answer; it must be understood from moment to moment.
Bruce Lee
#7. The reflection of nature in man's thought must be understood not lifelessly but in the eternal process of movement, the arising of contradictions and their solution.
Vladimir Lenin
#8. If human language, with its logic, is the way God has given us to understand the world, then the Torah must be understood in that same language and with that same logic.
David Novak
#9. Art is a means of expression that must be understood by everybody, everywhere. It grows out of the earth, the textures of our lives, and our experience.
Rufino Tamayo
#10. Vietnam should have taught us that nationalism, with its engines of independence and self-determination, is a more powerful force by far than Marxism and must be understood and respected.
Pete Hamill
#11. It must be understood that every architecture is bound to its time and manifests itself only in vital tasks and through the materials of its age. It has never been otherwise.
Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe
#12. Equity knows no difference of sex. In its vocabulary the word man must be understood in a generic, and not in a specific sense.
Herbert Spencer
#13. One thing must be understood : I have said nothing extraordinary or even surprising. What is extraordinary begins at the moment I stop. But I am no longer able to speak of it.
Maurice Blanchot
#14. When we speak of knowing God, it must be understood with reference to man's limited powers of comprehension. God, as He really is, is far beyond man's imagination, let alone understanding. God has revealed only so much of Himself as our minds can conceive and the weakness of our nature can bear.
John Milton
#15. Religion, it must be understood, is not faith. Religion is the story of faith.
Reza Aslan
#16. Paintings must be understood through the eyes, and that's not the word either. No writing, no talking, no singing, no dancing will explain them. They are the final, the nth whoopee of sight.
Charles Demuth
#17. A man can only attain knowledge with the help of those who possess it. This must be understood from the very beginning. One must learn from him who knows.
George Gurdjieff
#18. they play fast and loose with both historical fact and traditional religious interpretation in order to understand their past as they believe it must be understood
Mary R. Habeck
#19. To be stories at all they must be a series of events: but it must be understood that this series - the plot, as we call it - is only really a new whereby to catch something else.
C.S. Lewis
#20. Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question.
Niels Bohr
#21. It must be understood that, as adults, we are all terminal.
Jacob K. Javits
#22. There is no such thing as abstract Marxism, only concrete Marxism ... The Sinofication of Marxism - that is, making certain that its manifestation is imbued with Chinese peculiarities - is a problem that must be understood and solved by the party without delay.
Mao Zedong
#23. The sea is very beautiful and gives us many things, but it must be understood and respected, or it will slap you ...
J.Z. Colby
#24. Anything which must be understood by millions of people is so hopelessly divorced from how it is that it becomes a form of fiction.
Terence McKenna
#25. Americans assume that we never go to war to sustain our wealth, because war must be understood as a moral enterprise commensurate with our being a democracy.
Stanley Hauerwas
#26. A jolt is necessary. Europe must reaffirm it values of freedom, solidarity, peace. The EU must be understood and controlled by its citizens. I will do everything to secure profound change rather than decline.
Francois Hollande
#27. What is addiction, really? It is a sign, a signal, a symptom of distress. It is a language that tells us about a plight that must be understood.
Alice Miller
#28. The terms 'male' and 'female' must be understood as representing no more primitive opposition of sex to sex; but as defining two worlds of differing quality, in either of which men and women may jointly move and live.
Laura Riding
#29. His most important books are his two Logics, and these must be understood if the reasons for his views on other subjects are to be rightly apprehended.
Bertrand Russell
#30. We all place ourselves at various levels, and we are constantly falling from these heights. It is the falls we are ashamed of. Self-esteem is the cause of our shame, of our fall. It is this self-esteem that must be understood, and not the fall.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#31. When we speak the word 'life,' it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.
Antonin Artaud
#32. What must be understood is this: attackers attack as a form of defence. It is their instinctive response to threat, real or perceived. It may be desperate or it may be habit, or both, when desperation becomes a way of life. Behind the assault hides a fragile person.
Steven Erikson
#33. War, to be abolished, must be understood. To be understood, it must be studied." Karl Deutsch - preface of A Study of War by Quincy Wright. Added corollary by KMV: To abolish what is not understood is both arrogant and ignorant.
Karl Deutsch
#34. Saint Paul said the invisible must be understood by the visible. That was not a Hebrew idea, it was Greek.
Edith Hamilton
#35. Yet it can be recorded, and it can be understood. Indeed, it must be understood so that its like can be prevented in the future. That must be enough for us and for those who, let us hope, shall follow.
Timothy Snyder
#36. [A} maxim's legal character must be intrinsic: it must have what I shall call 'lawlike form.' this is why legal character, or universality, must be understood as lawlike form, that is, as a requirement of universalizability.
Christine M. Korsgaard
#37. Everything you need you already have. You are complete right now, you are a whole, total person, not an apprentice person on the way to someplace else. Your completeness must be understood by you and experienced in your thoughts as your own personal reality.
Beverly Sills
#38. One might think, that a period which, within fifty years, uproots, enslaves or kills seventy million human beings, should only, and forthwith, be condemned. But also its guilt must be understood.
Albert Camus
#39. Increasing extremism - across Africa and the world - must be understood in the context of the failure of our leaders properly to manage diversity within their borders.
Mo Ibrahim
#40. Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.
Roland Barthes
#42. There Is No God. This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#43. We might even say that the one thing which separates a saint from ordinary men is his readiness to be one with ordinary men. In this sense the word ordinary must be understood in its native and noble meaning; which is connected with the word order.
G.K. Chesterton
#44. Science must be understood as a social phenomenon, a gutsy, human enterprise, not the work of robots programed to collect pure information.
Stephen Jay Gould
#45. A psychoneurosis must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.
Carl Jung
#46. Lacanian theory must be understood as a kind of slave morality.
Judith Butler
#47. To understand why dictators have a problem with making peace - or at least a genuine peace - the link between the nature of a regime and its external behavior must be understood.
Natan Sharansky
#48. Medicine is not only a science; it is also an art. It does not consist of compounding pills and plasters; it deals with the very processes of life, which must be understood before they may be guided.
Paracelsus
#49. Here again is one grand element of a preacher's success. He must labour by all means to be understood. It was a wise saying of Archbishop Usher, To make easy things seem hard is every man's work; but to make hard things easy is the work of a great preacher.
J.C. Ryle
#50. Part of the genius of (Nick) Sabin's system was that he understood that no matter the skill set, he was inheriting vulnerable kids from various backgrounds. For those times when they made poor decisions, as they invariably did, the safety net must be strong as far and wide as possible.
Jeff Benedict
#51. The motif must always be set down in a simple way, easily grasped and understood by the beholder. By the elimination of superfluous detail, the spectator should be led along the road that the artist indicates to him, and from the first be made to notice what the artist has felt.
Alfred Sisley
#52. I believe every act of violence is also a message that needs to be understood. Violence should not be answered just by greater violence but by real understanding. We must ask: 'Where is the violence coming from? What is its meaning?
Jean Vanier
#53. In motherhood, where seemingly opposite realities can be simultaneously true, the role of nurturer invariably conflicts with the role of socializer. When trouble came as it surely must, was I the good cop who understood, the bad cop who terrorized, or both?
Mary Blakely
#54. It must be thoroughly understood that the lost land will never be won back by solemn appeals to the God, nor by hopes in any League of Nations, but only by the force of arms.
Adolf Hitler
#55. Tattooing, when understood in its entirety, must be seen as a religious act. The human being brings forth images from the center of the self and communicates them to the world. Fantasy is embodied in reality and the person is made whole.
Spider Webb
#56. You cannot have a private relationship in a public arena. You must look to an inner circle of people who really know you. Don't expect to have that kind of intimate relationship with people who only know you publicly. Do not seek to be understood by the world.
T.D. Jakes
#57. In order to say that some function is understood, every relevant step in the process must be elucidated.
Michael Behe
#58. Life must be lived forwards but can only be understood backwards. - Kierkegaard
Oliver Sacks
#59. The most advanced minds as well as the least advanced are obliged to use the same words. If we adopt new words, it will be even more difficult - if not impossible - to make ourselves understood. The new man must therefore express himself in conventional language.
Piet Mondrian
#60. The correct scientific response to something that is not understood must always be to look harder for the explanation, not give up and assume a supernatural cause.
David Attenborough
#61. I have never understood why one's affections must be confined, as once with women, to a single country.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#62. She smiled and understood my meaning without it needing to be said. She leaned in close and murmured in my ear, 'The world is ending, as it always must. But the end of the world is getting faster.
Claire North
#63. We cannot doubt that self-interest is the mainspring of human nature. It must be clearly understood that this word is used here to designate a universal, incontestable fact, resulting from the nature of man, and not an adverse judgment, as would be the word selfishness.
Frederic Bastiat
#64. Life can only be understood looking backward. It must be lived forward.
Eric Roth
#65. Beauty, however, must here be understood in its original meaning: as the glow of the true and the good irradiating from every ordered state of being, and not in the patent significance of immediate sensual appeal.
Josef Pieper
#66. Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
Soren Kierkegaard
#67. This is something basic to be understood - the ego must come to a peak, it must be strong, it must have attained an integrity - only then can you dissolve it. A weak ego cannot be dissolved. And this becomes a problem.
Rajneesh
#68. Good design, at least part of the time, includes the criterion of being direct in relation to the problem at hand - not obscure, trendy, or stylish. A new language, visual or verbal, must be couched in a language that is already understood.
Ivan Chermayeff
#69. But when we feel we are not understood, there is a sense in which we are homeless. And so we must always provide a home of understanding. There will inevitably be times when we do not understand someone's behavior or a certain response, but we can understand the person.
Mary Francis
#71. I think it is impossible to explain faith. It is like trying to explain air, which one cannot do by dividing it into its component parts and labeling them scientifically. It must be breathed to be understood.
Patrick White
#72. A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.
Frank Herbert
#73. Let it be understood, in the first place, that a science fiction story must be an exposition of a scientific theme and it must be also a story.
Hugo Gernsback
#74. One thing I do know is that poetry, to be understood, must be clear.
Mary Oliver
#75. I presented him with an African violet, which I saw as symbolically useful, though I'm not sure the others understood the subtleties. (African violets must be watered from the bottom, not the top, and this, I believe, is analogous to the writing of sonnets in the twenty-first century.)
Carol Shields
#76. Even though he grew up in churches, raised by church people, Waterhouse (as must be obvious by this point) never really understood their attitudes about sex. Why did they get so hung up on that one issue, when there were others like murder, war, poverty, and pestilence?
Neal Stephenson
#77. Some writers, notably Anton Chekov, argue that all characters must be admirable, because once we've looked at anyone deeply enough and understood their motivation we must identify with them rather than judge them.
Scarlett Thomas
#78. We are born to believe
We can't change a thing
We can't, and we never could.
But before you believe
The things you believe
You must understand
To be understood.
John C. O'Callaghan
#79. The word education must not be understood in the sense of teaching but of assisting the psychological development of the child.
Maria Montessori
#80. The truth is lived before it is understood. It must be fought for, tested, and appropriated. Truth is the way ... Anyone will easily understand it if he just gives himself to it.
Soren Kierkegaard
#81. Ben Says: Life is a Road of Many Lessons Which Must Be Lived To Be Understood. ~ So Think Great, Live Great & Be Great!
Timothy Pina
Bullying Ben
Timothy Pina
#82. Must we be put to shame by much smaller and poorer countries, by Ireland, France, Austria or Sweden, who have understood that a nation's support of its arts is a matter of both national pride and cultural survival?
Theodore Bikel
#83. I had never really understood what an adventure life could be, if you followed your heart and did what you really wanted to do, which is what we must all do in the end.
Sara Sheridan
#84. To define, is to select from among all the properties of a thing, those which shall be understood to be designated and declared by its name; and the properties must be well known to us before we can be competent to determine which of them are fittest to be chosen for this purpose.
John Stuart Mill
#85. Systemic causation must be taught if the effects of global warming are to be seriously understood. The
George Lakoff
#86. We ought not to be over-anxious to encourage innovation in cases of doubtful improvement, for an old system must ever have two advantages over a new one; it is established, and it is understood.
Charles Caleb Colton
#87. But in the meantime, you must be content, I say, to be misunderstood for a while. We are all very anxious to be understood, and it is very hard not to be. But there is one thing much more necessary."
"What is that, grandmother?"
"To understand other people.
George MacDonald
#88. If we are to send people, it must be for a very good reason - and with a realistic understanding that almost certainly we will lose lives. Astronauts and Cosmonauts have always understood this. Nevertheless, there has been and will be no shortage of volunteers.
Carl Sagan
#89. You can only possess what you experience. Truth to be understood must be lived.
Charlie Peacock
#90. Other nations of different habits are not enemies: they are godsends. Men require of their neighbours something sufficiently akin to be understood, something sufficiently different to provoke attention, and something great enough to command admiration. We must not expect, however, all the virtues.
Alfred North Whitehead
#91. He knew he would always be the sad one: caged in that little round of skull, imprisoned in that beating and most secret heart, his life must always walk down lonely passages. Lost. He understood that men were forever strangers to one another, that no one ever comes really to know any one,
Thomas Wolfe
#92. We knew the difference between that which cannot be expressed and that which must. We understood that while words are a path taking us only so far, they are a requisite to the journey. They are like road maps that show us which way to go.
Laura Bynum
#93. While tacit knowledge can be possessed by itself, explicit knowledge must rely on being tacitly understood and applied. Hence all knowledge is either tacit or rooted in tacit knowledge. A wholly explicit knowledge is unthinkable.
Michael Polanyi
#94. I understood why Giovanni had wanted me and had brought me to his last retreat. I was to destroy this room and give to Giovanni a new and better life. This life could only be my own, which, in order to transform Giovanni's, must first become a part of Giovanni's room.
James Baldwin
#95. The world in which we live can be understood as a result of muddle and accident; but if it is the outcome of deliberate purpose, the purpose must have been that of a fiend. For my part, I find accident a less painful and more plausible hypothesis.
Bertrand Russell
#96. A story has its purpose and its path. It must be told correctly for it to be understood.
Marcus Sedgwick
#97. Rules must be established and enforced, and, as numbers are increased in prisons, the necessity for vigilance increases. These rules, let it be understood, may be kindly while firmly enforced. I would never suffer any exhibition of ill-temper or an arbitrary exercise of authority.
Dorothea Dix
#98. Marley was dead, to begin with ... This must be distintly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.
Charles Dickens
#99. 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
#100. I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose.
Charlie Chaplin
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