It's not enough that you believe what you see. You must also understand what you see.

You already know what you know, after all — and, unless your life is perfect, what you know is not enough. You remain threatened by disease, and self-deception, and unhappiness, and malevolence, and betrayal, and corruption, and pain, and limitation. You are subject to all these things, in the final analysis, because you are just too ignorant to protect yourself. If you just knew enough, you could be healthier and more honest. You would suffer less. You could recognize, resist and even triumph over malevolence and evil. You would neither betray a friend, nor deal falsely and deceitfully in business, politics or love. However, your current knowledge has neither made you perfect nor kept you safe. So, it is insufficient, by definition — radically, fatally insufficient.

When understanding is separated from reality, we lose our powers. Understanding must constantly be tested against reality and updated accordingly. This isn’t a box we can tick, a task with a definite beginning and end, but a continuous process.

The existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality,
and the other part that has not yet been understood is infinite. Whenever we
proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we
may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word ‘understanding’.

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

When you understand one thing through and through, you understand everything. When you try to understand everything, you will not understand anything.

Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word 'understanding.

This is the mystery. When you understand one thing through and through, you understand everything. When you try to understand everything, you will not understand anything. The best way is to understand yourself, and then you will understand everything. So when you try hard to make your own way, you will help others, and you will be helped by others. Before you make your own way you cannot help anyone, and no one can help you.

"We really have to understand the person we want to love. If our love is only a will to possess, it is not love. If we only think of ourselves, if we know only our own needs and ignore the needs of the other person, we cannot love. We must look deeply in order to see and understand the needs, aspirations, and suffering of the person we love. This is the ground of real love. You cannot resist loving another person when you really understand him or her.

From time to time, sit close to the one you love, hold his or her hand, and ask, 'Darling, do I understand you enough? Or am I making you suffer? Please tell me so that I can learn to love you properly. I don't want to make you suffer, and if I do so because of my ignorance, please tell me so that I can love you better, so that you can be happy." If you say this in a voice that communicates your real openness to understand, the other person may cry.

That is a good sign, because it means the door of understanding is opening and everything will be possible again.

Maybe a father does not have time or is not brave enough to ask his son such a question. Then the love between them will not be as full as it could be. We need courage to ask these questions, but if we don't ask, the more we love, the more we may destroy the people we are trying to love. True love needs understanding. With understanding, the one we love will certainly flower.

Perhaps then we shall stop pretending that we know everything, and shall be less bold in raising questions and getting
into confusing disputes with others about things to which
our understandings are not suited — things of which we can’t
form any clear or distinct perceptions in our minds, or, as
happens all too often, things of which we have no notions at
all. If we can find out what the scope of the understanding
is, how far it is able to achieve certainty, and in what cases
it can only judge and guess, that may teach us to accept our
limitations and to rest content with knowing only what our
human condition enables us to know.

Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.

Understanding is often a prelude to forgiveness, but they are not the same, and we often forgive what we cannot understand (seeing nothing else to do) and understand what we cannot pardon.

I would like to understand things better, but I don’t want to understand them perfectly.

If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.