understanding is the absence of the demand for understanding — now or tomorrow.

Misunderstood! It is a right fool's word. Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

Understanding is not such that we either enjoy it or lack it altogether. To be human and to be aware is to encounter only what is in some manner understood. Thus, it may be said that understanding is an unsought condition; we inexorably inhabit a world of intelligibles.

We have come to confuse information with understanding.

If you cannot understand something, then you have understood it incorrectly.

It is by universal misunderstanding that we agree with each other. If, by some misfortune, we understood each other, we would never agree.

Understanding means throwing away your knowledge.

We cannot understand. The best is perhaps what we understand least.

What we understand is not enough to understand why we understand it. (Signature line on his emails)

Our understanding is a faculty of concepts, i.e., a discursive understanding, for which it must of course be contingent what and how different might be the particular that can be given to it in nature and brought under its concepts.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Not to understand is profound; to understand is shallow. Not to understand is to be on the inside; to understand is to be on the outside.

A lot of people have thought of understanding as just knowledge of true causes, but then there is a problem of why we value knowledge - if not to understand things. And in effect understanding is what underwrites the desire for knowledge in the context of science.

To be great is to be misunderstood.