There's always been a religious strain in me. I can't get rid of it. I don't want to get rid of it. I'm not involved in a church, but I understand that impulse to believe in something that's never going to betray you.
History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.
Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar situation here on this planet, it is because they have accepted a religious Faith or a secular Ideology (Ideologies are the modern form of Faiths) and just stopped thinking.
How wonderful to know that when Jesus Christ speaks to you and to me, he enables you to understand yourself, to die to that self because of the cross, and brings the real you to birth.
I understand why some kid in his bedroom in Wisconsin thinks downloading songs couldn't hurt anyone. True fans will buy the CD or go see the movie after downloading, but to say it doesn't affect anyone - come on.
Sometimes saying goodbye to the ones you love can be the most appropriate thing to do in order to help them understand there are consequences for each and every choice we make.
I understand people who boo us. It's like going to Broadway show, you pay for your tickets and expect to be entertained. When you're not, you have a right to complain.
To live life on your own terms, you've got to understand that you're going to get it wrong sometimes, but you'll have power of knowing that you are giving it everything you've got and blazing your own trail.
A blind man knows he cannot see, and is glad to be led, though it be by a dog; but he that is blind in his understanding, which is the worst blindness of all, believes he sees as the best, and scorns a guide.
I think the secret is really observation. Well, if you observe what's going on and try to figure out how people are thinking, I think you can always write something that people will understand.
But I deal with this meditating and by understanding I've been put on the planet to serve humanity. I have to remind myself to live simply and not to overindulge, which is a constant battle in a material world.
You could say Shakespeare is so extraordinary precisely because he was so ordinary. He had all the usual anxieties and understandings of what it is to have children, lose children, get married, struggle to make a living and so on.
What they don't understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you're eleven, you're also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one.
I do believe that reading can help you understand what you're writing and see what others are doing. But sometimes the desire for more information can act as an inhibitor.
In some South Pacific cultures, a speaker holds a conch shell as a symbol of temporary position of authority. Leaders must understand who holds the conch that is, who should be listened to and when.
Theologians and other clerks, You won't understand this book, -- However bright your wits -- If you do not meet it humbly, And in this way, Love and Faith Make you surmount Reason, for They are the protectors of Reason's house.
I err on the side of a kind of optimistic agnostic sense that there's something that put us all here - some energy or something that we are not in a position to understand.
Manned spaceflight has lost its glamour - understandably so, because it hardly seems inspiring, 40 years after Apollo, for astronauts merely to circle the Earth in the space shuttle and the International Space Station.
Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. The older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young.
Lutherans, whose arguments and mistakes will not be difficult to contest or discover, do not want to attribute any value to works, and they do not understand enough the scope of the justification.
Some Jews and Muslims accuse Christians of being idolatrous for believing in the Trinity. My response to both groups is that they fundamentally misunderstand the Christian understanding of the Trinity.
