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Too much nicety of detail disgusts the greatest part of readers, and to throw a multitude of particulars under general heads, and lay down rules of extensive comprehension, is to common understandings of little use.
Sep 10, 2025
Pleasures First look from morning's window The rediscovered book Fascinated faces Snow, the change of the seasons The newspaper The dog Dialectics Showering, swimming Old music Comfortable shoes Comprehension New music Writing, planting Traveling Singing Being friendly
I believe that both art and the human striving for cognitive comprehension are manifest forms of the grand game in which nothing more is stipulated than the game's rules; both art and actively solicited perceptions are but special cases of the recurring creative act to which we owe our existence.
The more we become able to become a child again, to keep ourselves childlike, the more we can understand that because we love the world and we are open to understanding, to comprehension, that when we kill the child in us, we are no longer.
The magic of the mechanisms inside each genetic structure saying exactly where that nerve cell should go - the complexity of these mathematical models is beyond human comprehension.
To allow myself to be loved by God in my deepest brokenness is to experience a love that defies human comprehension.
Because God is not only infinitely greater and more excellent than all other being, but he is the head of the universal system of existence; the foundation and fountain of all being and all beauty; from whom all is perfectly derived, and on whom all is most absolutely and perfectly dependent; of whom, and through whom, and to whom is all being and all perfection; and whose being and beauty are, as it were, the sum and comprehension of all existence and excellence: much more than the sun is the fountain and summary comprehension of all the light and brightness of the day.
There are planes that are not light. There are planes that are shadowy. But that is not our interest in meditation. We want brightness, ecstasy, brilliance beyond comprehension.
A better understanding of the brain is certain to lead man to a richer comprehension both of himself, of his fellow man, and of society, and in fact of the whole world with its problems.
People who lose children have their hearts warped into weird shapes. Some try to deny it has happened. Some pretend it hasn't. Losing friends or parents is not the same. To lose a child is beyond comprehension. It defies biology. It contradicts the natural order of history and genealogy. It derails common sense. It violates time. It creates a huge, black, bottomless hole that swallows all hope.
We are living at a time where a handful of people have wealth beyond comprehension - huge yachts, jet planes, tens of billions of dollars, more money than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes. But at the same time, millions of people are struggling to feed their families or put a roof over their heads or find the money to go to a doctor.
All events are secretly interrelated; the sweep of all we are doing reaches beyond the horizon of our comprehension.
Discipleship is not limited to what you can comprehend – it must transcend all comprehension. Plunge into the deep waters beyond your own comprehension, and I will help you to comprehend even as I do. Bewilderment is the true comprehension. Not to know where you are going is the true knowledge. My comprehension transcends yours.
Bewilderment is the true comprehension. Not to know where you are going is the true knowledge.
Jesus! it is the name which moves the harps of heaven to melody. Jesus! the life of all our joys. If there be one name more charming, more precious than another, it is this name. It is woven into the very warp and woof of our psalmody. Many of our hymns begin with it, and scarcely any, that are good for anything, end without it. It is the sum total of all delights. It is the music with which the bells of heaven ring; a song in a word; an ocean for comprehension, although a drop for brevity; a matchless oratorio in two syllables; a gathering up of the hallelujahs of eternity in five letters.
The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
I say that creeds, dogmas, and theologies are inventions of the mind. It is the nature of the mind to make sense out of experience, to reduce the conglomerates of experience to units of comprehension which we call principles, or ideologies, or concepts. Religious experience is dynamic, fluid, effervescent, yeasty. But the mind can't handle these so it has to imprison religious experience in some way, get it bottled up. Then, when the experience quiets down, the mind draws a bead on it and extracts concepts, notions, dogmas, so that religious experience can make sense to the mind.
Someone could have an outstanding comprehension of a bodybuilding diet and a background in nutrition but not have the work ethic and desire to put it into practice. That person won’t be as successful as the person who understands some basics and puts them into action regularly.
The strong tendency to blame others is a barrier, an obstacle for the comprehension of our own mistakes.
Welcome to the age of paper money, where governments and central banks can manufacture as much money as they want without limit. Gold was the last limit. Its banishment as a standard unleashed the inflation monster and leviathan itself, which has swelled beyond comprehension.
Too often we judge people based on our own backgrounds and experiences, but when you understand people's stories, it's easier to understand their demeanor.
We are now at a point in time when the ability to receive, utilize, store, transform and transmit data - the lowest cognitive form - has expanded literally beyond comprehension. Understanding and wisdom are largely forgotten as we struggle under an avalanche of data and information.
The attributes of God, though intelligible to us on their surface yet, for the very reason that they are infinite, transcend our comprehension, when they are dwelt upon, when they are followed out, and can only be received by faith.
I moved down the street like a cloud of awareness following a body that seemed simultaneously familiar and foreign. There was an incomprehensible attachment to that body, although it no longer felt like "mine". It continued to send out signals of its sensory perception, yet how or where those signals wwere being received was beyond comprehension.
Atoms are weird stuff, behaving like active agents rather than inert substances. They make unpredictable choices between alternative possibilities according to the laws of quantum mechanics. It appears that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every atom. The universe is also weird, with its laws of nature that make it hospitable to the growth of mind. I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it passes beyond the scale of our comprehension.
Jesus is not asking us to do anything for him that he hasn’t already done for us, under conditions of difficulty beyond our comprehension.
Modern man lives isolated in his artificial environment, not because the artificial is evil as such, but because of his lack of comprehension of the forces which make it work- of the principles which relate his gadgets to the forces of nature, to the universal order. It is not central heating which makes his existence 'unnatural,' but his refusal to take an interest in the principles behind it. By being entirely dependent on science, yet closing his mind to it, he leads the life of an urban barbarian.
Politics of all sorts, I confess, are far beyond my limited powers of comprehension. Those of this country as far as I have been able to observe, resolve themselves into two great motives. The aristocratic desire of elevation and separation, and the democratic desire of demolishing and levelling.
Apathy is one of the characteristic responses of any living organism when it is subjected to stimuli too intense or too complicated to cope with. The cure for apathy is comprehension.
Half the time I read Hayek's The Sensory Order with amazement at the extent of his reading and comprehension. He is right most of the time.
The wonderful arrangement and harmony of the cosmos would only originate in the plan of an almighty omniscient being. This is and remains my greatest comprehension.
It is neither just the religious, the spiritual, the power-hungry, the evil, the ignorant, the corrupt, the Christian, the Muslim, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Jew, nor the atheist that makes a hypocrite, but being a human being. Any man who thinks himself to be free of hypocrisy while committed to cherry-picking others for such, I am confident, the Almighty can prove to him a great deal of his own hypocrisy even beyond his earthly comprehension.
Teaching man his relatively small sphere in the creation, it also encourages him by its lessons of the unity of Nature and shows him that his power of comprehension allies him with the great intelligence over-reaching all.
An allegory is not meant to be taken literally. There is a great lack of comprehension on the part of some readers.
Popularity doesn't bother me. It attests to the affection and comprehension of the public. The important thing is to retain the pioneer spirit. I profoundly love the profession, and I work on each film as if it were the first - and the last. Giving the best of myself. Many of the 'greats' ask their arranger to write their scores for them. Me, I write all alone, from the first note to the last. All.
I had no answer to those questions, only hope. With absolutely no one to turn to, no Mikey, no Axe, no Danny, I have to face the final battle by myself, maybe lonely, maybe desolate, maybe against formidable odds. But I was not giving up. I had only one Teammate. And He moved, as ever, in mysterious ways. But I was a Christian, and He had somehow saved me from a thousand AK-47 bullets on that day. No one had shot me, which was well nigh beyond all comprehension.
There is a scientific explanation of healings by the power of Mind over matter which demonstrates that such healings are not miracles, but are within Nature's law which cannot be transcended by either man or God. The Fact that they were beyond man's comprehension did not prove that they were supernatural - for an airplane or radio would have been thought supernatural to dwellers in places far removed even one generation ago.
I refer to the misunderstanding of Soviet Russia as an aggressive power, militaristically and ideologically bent upon world domination 'seeing', to quote a recent speech of the British Prime Minister, 'the rest of the world as its rightful fiefdom.' How any rational person, viewing objectively the history of the last thirty-five years, could entertain this 'international misunderstanding' challenges, if it does not defeat, comprehension. The notion has no basis in fact... If Russia is bent on world conquest, she has been remarkably slothful and remarkably unsuccessful.
To be specific, is to exhibit a knowledge of the principles and art of adjusting; a comprehension of facts so systematized that they are available for the relief of disease.
I failed everything in school. I left when I was 13 because I had no comprehension of what the hell they were talking about up there at the blackboard. I must have that ADD thing. But, listening to people I thought, that's wonderful to be able to tell a story.
A politician will always tip off his true belief by stating the opposite at the beginning of the sentence. For maximum comprehension, do not start listening until the first clause is concluded. Begin instead at the word 'BUT' which begins the second, or active, clause. This is the way to tell a liberal from a conservative - before they tell you. Thus: 'I have always believed in a strong national defense, second to none, but...(a liberal, about to propose a $20 billion defense cut).
...a man estimable for his learning, amiable for his life, and venerable for his piety. Arbuthnot was a man of great comprehension, skilful in his profession, versed in the sciences, acquainted with ancient literature, and able to animate his mass of knowledge by a bright and active imagination; a scholar with great brilliance of wit; a wit who, in the crowd of life, retained and discovered a noble ardour of religious zeal.
Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know - and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance. It is better to know - even if the knowledge endures only for the moment that comes before destruction - than to gain eternal life at the price of a dull and swinish lack of comprehension of a universe that swirls unseen before us in all its wonder. That was the choice of Achilles, and it is mine, too.
The aim of science is, on the one hand, as complete a comprehension as possible of the connection between perceptible experiences in their totality, and, on the other hand, the achievement of this aim by employing a minimum of primary concepts and relations.
The major accomplishment of analyzing illiteracy so far has been the listing of symptoms: the decrease in functional literacy; a general degradation of writing skills and reading comprehension; an alarming increase of packaged language (cliches used in speeches, canned messages); and a general tendency to substitute visual media (especially television and video) for written language.
. . . what humanity most desperately needs is not the creation of new worlds but the recreation in terms of human comprehension of the world we have -- and it is for this reason that arts go on for generation to generation in spite of the fact that Phidias has already carved and Homer has already sung. The creation, we are informed, was accomplished in seven days with Sunday off, but the recreation will never be accomplished because it is always accomplished anew for each generation of living men.
All propaganda has to be popular and has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach.
In all our academies we attempt far too much. ... In earlier times lectures were delivered upon chemistry and botany as branches of medicine, and the medical student learned enough of them. Now, however, chemistry and botany are become sciences of themselves, incapable of comprehension by a hasty survey, and each demanding the study of a whole life, yet we expect the medical student to understand them. He who is prudent, accordingly declines all distracting claims upon his time, and limits himself to a single branch and becomes expert in one thing.
I remember being taught to read at a very early age. Like creepy young. I remember being in the crib, reading. My parents were very impressed. My reading speed, comprehension and overall ability has remained at that level ever since.
Seek first to understand, then to be understood.