Perfectly Understood Quotes

#1. We never have a full demonstration, although there is always an underlying reason for the truth, even if it is only perfectly understood by God, who alone penetrated the infinite series in one stroke of the mind.

Gottfried Leibniz

#2. Grammar, perfectly understood, enables us not only to express our meaning fully and clearly, but so to express it as to enable us to defy the ingenuity of man to give to our words any other meaning than that which we ourselves intend them to express.

William Cobbett

#3. If you can express yourself so as to be perfectly understood in ten words, never use a dozen.

Horace Mann

#4. God's law is 'right reason.' When perfectly understood it is called 'wisdom.' When applied by government in regulating human relations it is called 'justice.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

#5. This was the first day of our beginning to take up plants: we had much pleasure in collecting them for the natives offered their assistance and perfectly understood the method of taking them up and pruning them.

William Bligh

#6. We have at last ascertained that miracles can be perfectly understood; that there is nothing mysterious about them; that they are simply transparent falsehoods.

Robert Green Ingersoll

#7. Poetry gives most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly understood.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#8. In this world things are beautiful only because they are not quite seen, or not perfectly understood. Poetry is precious chiefly because it suggests more than it declares.

Anthony Trollope

#9. I perfectly understood President Obama's attitude throughout the French presidential campaign. He had no reason to distance himself from Nicolas Sarkozy. It's the basic solidarity that leaders who worked together owe to each other.

Francois Hollande

#10. Steampunk appeals to the idea of uniqueness, to the one-off item, while every mainstream consumer technology of recent years is about putting human beings into ever more granular, packageable and mass-produced identities so that they can be sold or sold to, perfectly mapped and understood.

Nick Harkaway

#11. Reef changed what he knew about his Sense. They spoke little but understood each other perfectly.

Veronica Rossi

#12. The "hillbilly" girls were generating more enriched Tubealloy per run than the PhDs had...The District Engineer understood perfectly. Those girls...had been trained like soldiers. Do what you're told. Don't ask why.

Denise Kiernan

#13. So it was perfectly possible that there were men who liked shopping, men who understood exactly what it was all about, but Mma Ramotwe had yet to meet such a man. Maybe they existed elsewhere - in France, perhaps - but they did not seem to be much in evidence in Botswana.

Alexander McCall Smith

#14. When Chveya was seven years old she had understood perfectly how the world worked. Now she was eight, and there were some questions.

Orson Scott Card

#15. I never studied science or physics at school, and yet when I read complex books on quantum physics I understood them perfectly because I wanted to understand them. The study of quantum physics helped me to have a deeper understanding of the Secret, on an energetic level,

Rhonda Byrne

#16. Intellectually he understood perfectly what the problem was: guilt and doubt, the waste products of innocence and faith, inhibited him and filled him with self-loathing even at his own weakness in trying to be free of them.

Ken MacLeod

#17. Does she make the risk worth it?"
Despite the years they'd been at odds, they still understood each other perfectly. Ian didn't hesitate to answer.
"It isn't a matter of choice, Benjamin."
The other man sighed. "It never is.

Kristen Callihan

#18. Lyall understood a broken heart, but it could not be allowed to rumple perfectly good shirtwaists.

Gail Carriger

#19. And yet always you feel as though you understood perfectly the people and why they do everything as they do.Still you are absolutely severed from them.

Paul Bowles

#20. I found everything perfectly clear, and I really understood absolutely nothing.

Jean-Paul Sartre

#21. I was hugely impressed ... was the ultimate example of a man who knew what he didn't know, was perfectly willing to admit it, and didn't want to leave until he understood. That's heroic to me.
I wish every grad student had that attitude.

Randy Pausch

#22. And yet, because people knew how easily they could happen, because they didn't go around with the illusion that they understood perfectly the things other people said, they were used to interrupting each other to ask if they had understood correctly.

Nicole Krauss

#23. If you understood a business perfectly and the future of the business, you need very little in the way of a margin of safety.

Warren Buffett

#24. She sniffed, and smiled a bit, but not too much because if there is one thing worse than someone who doesn't understand you it's someone who understands perfectly, before you've had a chance to have a good pout about not being understood.

Terry Pratchett

#25. She understood perfectly that when the object of anticipation becomes paramount, trouble begins to lurk like a panther.

Richard Ford

#26. The Ratignolles understood each other perfectly. If ever the fusion of two human beings into one has been accomplished on this sphere it was surely in their union.

Kate Chopin

#27. I now understood the secret of music and knew what makes it so infinitely superior to all the other arts: its incorporeality. Once it has left an instrument it becomes its own master, a free and independent creature of sound, weightless, incorporeal and perfectly in tune with the universe.

Walter Moers

#28. And he knew that at that moment, they understood each other perfectly, and when he told her what he was going to do now, she would not say 'be careful' or 'don't do it', but she would accept his decision because she would not have expected anything less of him.

J.K. Rowling

#29. 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

#30. I was too shocked to register that he'd just cursed in Ancient Greek, and I'd understood him perfectly.

Rick Riordan

#31. Sigh. These were my people now that I was a writer, people who didn't understand anything. I mean, they understood perfectly the thing I cared most about - books - but basically were moron-level elsewhere.

Claire Dederer