Not Understanding Texts Quotes & Sayings

Greed is a fat demon with a small mouth and whatever you feed it is never enough. — Janwillem Van De Wetering

But for my money, and for my understanding of Jung and depth psychology, the stories of the Bible (and all sacred texts and oral traditions) emerged out of the collective unconscious. Paradoxically, this doesn't make them any less valuable. It makes them much more valuable to us, because they reveal to us the nature of being human, which is the purpose of religion.
If religion is about the business of helping us to become human, then these sacred stories are about how to be human. That is what religion is. To me, the idea that these myths welled up out of the collective unconscious is a liberating and empowering realization. I get it now! What a relief! — J. Pittman McGehee

Life was never meant to be safe. It was meant to be lived right to the end. — Caroline Myss

You should not translate for more than two hours at a time. After that, you lose your edge, the language becomes clumsy, rigid. — Tom Stoppard

It was brave of them to love again. It made me think I could do it too. — Ally Condie

There is no such thing as 'too insane' unless others turn up dead due to your actions. — Mahatma Gandhi

I'm not talking about reforming #Islam..it is to reform the #Muslim minds & the Muslim understandings of the texts. — Tariq Ramadan

There are still truths in the Bible and many other ancient texts despite what religions have done to destroy and debase them. Religious dogma and myth have been used very successfully either to suppress understanding or to twist the truth sufficiently to turn something positive into something negative. — David Icke

The stubborn of a captive mentality can be clearly seen in the formulation of national development plans in most developing nations where the fundamental meaning and criteria of knowledge and development, modernization and reform, progress and change, happiness, tolerance, pluralism and their respective antonyms - such as under-development and corruption - are all derived from Western frameworks. Sometimes the strangest phenomenon surfaces - such as when the methodology of understanding and teaching indigenous religions is regarded as being uncritical and less objective if it does not utilize the methods developed by Western scholars in the understanding and teaching Western religions and religious texts. — Wan Mohd Nor Wan Daud

Before you go, would you sign that case of balls for me? — Mickey Mantle

Rid of craving and without clinging, an expert in the study of texts, and understanding the right sequence of the words, he may indeed be called "In his last body", "Great in wisdom" and a "Great man." — Gautama Buddha

Why did Marx and Lenin succeed were Hong and Mahdi failed? Not because socialist humanism was philosophically more sophisticated than Islamic and Christan theology, but rather because Marx and Lenin devoted more attention to understanding the technological and economic realities of their time than to perusing ancient texts and prophetic dreams — Yuval Noah Harari

Prior to any generalization about literature, literary texts have to be read, and the possibility of reading can never be taken for granted. It is an act of understanding that can never be observed, nor in any way prescribed or verified. — Paul De Man

It is unclear from any modern critique of religion that anyone is in a position to disprove the reality of religious mystery expressed in the ancients' texts, even if we probe that mystery. Modern affirmations of such faith as well as denials of it are acts of faith. Yet these critiques of religion bring us closer to understanding the human side of divine-human relations. And this is what believers and nonbelievers, believing and unbelieving theologians and historians of religion share: a desire to understand the human side of the equation in religious traditions. — Mark S. Smith

The real question is: What is expiation? Is it compatible with a pure image of God? Is it not a phase in man's religious development that we need to move beyond? If Jesus is to be the new messenger of God, should he not be opposing this notion? So the actual point at issue is whether the New Testament texts - if read rightly - articulate an understanding of expiation that we too can accept, whether we are prepared to listen to the whole of the message that it offers us. — Pope Benedict XVI

There's always room for improvement, but the judges are looking for big airs and stylish tricks. — Shaun White

Interpretation that aims at, or thrives on, uniqueness can usually be attributed to pride (an attempt to "outclever" the rest of the world), a false understanding of spirituality (wherein the Bible is full of deeply buried truths waiting to be mined by the spiritually sensitive person with special insight), or vested interests (the need to support a theological bias, especially in dealing with texts that seem to go against that bias). — Gordon D. Fee

Later on in life you will learn that writers are merely open, helpless texts with no real understanding of what they have written and therefore must half-believe anything and everything that is said of them. — Lorrie Moore

It is all too often the case with certain types of scholars of Malay-Indonesian Islam, when dealing with Islamic texts such as the one in question in which they are confronted with a word they do not quite understand, that instead of admitting their failure to explain the word in the text as due to their own lack of understanding, they would proceed to conjure up some excuse for branding the word as an enigma, and then, because it is an enigma to them, they would proceed further to reject it with such pronouncements as: "it seems obvious that this puzzling word is due to a scribal error", so that they might suggest their own futile substitute. — Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas

'Newhart' ran the longest, and it was great to have a regular role, but I run into a lot of film fans, and they ask me about 'Blade Runner.' I was grateful to be a part of that. — William Sanderson

Plots, true or false, are necessary things, To raise up commonwealths and ruin kings. — John Dryden

Spiritual literature can be a great aid to an aspirant, or it can be a terrible hindrance. If it is used to inspire practice, motivate compassion, ad nourish devotion, it serves a very valuable purpose. If scriptural study is used for mere intellectual understanding, for pride of accomplishment, or as a substitute for actual practice, then one is taking in too much mental food, which is sure to result in intellectual indigestion. (152) — Prem Prakash

An emphasis on reading individual texts with a view to understanding the ideological visions of the world that underlie them has also had a dramatic impact. This type of interpretation requires historians to treat ancient authors, not as sources of fact, but rather like second-hand-car salesmen whom they would do well to approach with a healthy caution. — Peter Heather

It is foolish to teach a person a lesson by killing them. For they'd be too dead to learn anything. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana