Understanding - Quotes
Life is the first gift, love is the second, and understanding the third.
Instinct and intuition play an important part in human understanding and experience... but they should never be treated as the final word on a subject.
It is always the case, with mathematics, that a little direct experience of thinking over things on your own can provide a much deeper understanding than merely reading about them.
Any fool can criticize, complain, and condemn-and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.
A theory in science is a logical creation. It reflects the most accurate experimental observations and the best understanding of how the world works. Yet a scientific theory doesn’t necessarily represent absolute truth. It can only capture the state of our knowledge so far. There’s every chance that a new piece of evidence will come to light that disproves the theory, and sends the theoreticians back to the drawing board.
You can never pinpoint the exact moment that a species came to be, because it never did. Just like how you used to be a baby and now you're older, but there was no single day when you went to bed young and woke up old. (...) There was no first human. It sounds like a paradox, it sounds like it breaks the whole theory of evolution, but it's really a key to truly understanding how evolution works. Evolution happens like a movie, with frames moving by both quickly and gradually, and we often can't see the change while it's occurring. Every time we find a fossil, it's a snapshot back in time, often with thousands of frames missing in between, and we're forced to reconstruct the whole film. Life is what happens in between the snapshots. Instead of a nice smooth road this is a journey on stepping stones and we give each one their own name.
Science is much more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking. This is central to its success. Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don`t conform to our preconceptions. It counsels us to carry alternative hypotheses in our heads and see which ones best match the facts. It urges on us a fine balance between no-holds-barred openness to new ideas, however heretical, and the most rigorous skeptical scrutiny of everything - new ideas and established wisdom. We need wide appreciation of this kind of thinking. It works. It`s an essential tool for a democracy in an age of change. Our task is not just to train more scientists but also to deepen public understanding of science.
We are an intelligent species and the use of our intelligence quite properly gives us pleasure. In this respect the brain is like a muscle. When we think well, we feel good. Understanding is a kind of ecstasy.
My goal is simple. It is complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.
We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction.
One of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.
The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.