Understanding Why Quotes:

Understanding why is never enough.

- Lucy Freeman

source: Lucy Freeman (1957). “Search for Love”

topic: Understanding, Enough, Understanding Why

If there is one sweeping generalization I can make without fear of contradiction, it is that 'change' is the scariest word in the English language Nothing will change in our lives until we change our own behavior. Insight won't do it. Understanding why we do the self-defeating things we do won't make us stop doing them. Nagging and pleading with the other person to change won't do it. We have to act. We have to take the first step down a new road.

- Susan Forward

topic: Self, Understanding, Nagging, Pleading, Understanding Why

Knowledge is not power, it is only potential. Applying that knowledge is power. Understanding why and when to apply that knowledge is wisdom!

- Takeda Shingen

topic: Understanding, Knowledge Is Power, Understanding Why

Understanding why something happened does not help to reduce the problem.

- Richard Bandler

topic: Understanding, Doe, Helping, Understanding Why

Listening is not understanding the words of the question asked, listening is understanding why the question was asked in the first place.

- Simon Sinek

source: Twitter post from Oct 02, 2012

topic: Understanding, Listening, Asking, Questions Asked, Understanding Why

Going out in the field, it's always enlightening to see what's working and what's not and to sit down and talk - I was with young girls in south Africa - understanding why our tools for prevention aren't being adopted, and what way may need to invent to help protect them.

- Bill Gates

source: Source: www.ctvnews.ca

topic: Being Adopted, Understanding Why

The thing I remember the most was not understanding why, if you were doing the right thing, then why did people want to kill you? I remember asking my parents, 'Why is it when people are trying to help other people then they're dying?'

- Sandra Bullock

source: Source: acttwomagazine.com

topic: Helping Others, People, Parent, Understanding Why

Cate Blanchett is mesmerizing. I don't know why. It's beyond my understanding. Why we all want to work with her is she elevates the rest of us. She's just got some ethereal grace and elegance that's beyond me, and an acute understanding of human nature. She's just exquisite. She's otherworldly.

- Brad Pitt

topic: Grace, Understanding, Want, Ethereal, Mesmerizing

I certainly do believe anyone engaged in the management of money should have a standard of measurement, and that both he and the party whose money is managed should have a clear understanding why it is the appropriate standard, what time period should be utilized, etc.

- Warren Buffett

topic: Party, Believe, Should Have, Understanding Why

I was always interested in finding the elegance of each style and understanding why it influences so many people.

- Volker Bertelmann

topic: People, Understanding, Style, Understanding Why

There may be men who act without understanding why. I do not. To listen much, pick out the good and follow it; to see much and ponder it: this comes next to understanding.

- Confucius

source: Confucius (1909). “The Sayings of Confucius”

topic: Men, Understanding, May, Understanding Why

I lived in America for a long time before I started working as an actor. Some actors show up on set and have never done an American accent before, so they rely on a slew of technical mechanisms. Part of what makes an accent is understanding why people speak that way - you have to understand the culture.

- Idris Elba

topic: America, Long, People, Understanding Why

I don't have any problem understanding why people flunk out of college or quit their jobs or cheat on each other or break the law or spray-paint walls. A little bit outside of things is where some people feel each other. We do it to replace the frame of family. We do it to erase and remake our origins in their own images. To say, I too was here.

- Lidia Yuknavitch

topic: Jobs, Wall, College, Spray Paint, Understanding Why

If I had my way, I would declare a moratorium on public preaching of 'the plan of salvation' in America for one to two years. Then I would call on everyone who has use of the airways and the pulpits to preach the holiness of God, therighteousness of God and the law of God, until sinners would cry out, 'What must we do to be saved?' Then I would take them off in a corner and whisper the gospel to them. Such drastic action is needed because we have gospel-hardened a generation of sinners by telling them how to be saved before they have any understanding why they need to be saved.

- Paris Reidhead

topic: Years, Law, Two, Declaring, Plan Of Salvation

I'm an angel. I kill firstborns while their mamas watch. I turn cities into salt. I even, when I feel like it, rip the souls from little girls, and from now till kingdom come, the only thing you can count on in your existence is never understanding why.

- Christopher Walken

topic: Girl, Rip, Angel, Kingdom Come, Understanding Why

He’d only ever seen a gun once, a smaller one on the hip of that old deputy, a gun he’d always figured was more for show. He stuffed a fistful of deadly rounds in his pocket, thinking how each one could end an individual life, and understanding why such things were forbidden. Killing a man should be harder than waving a length of pipe in their direction. It should take long enough for one’s conscience to get in the way.

- Hugh Howey

source: "Wool Omnibus Edition". Book by Hugh Howey, January 25, 2012.

topic: Gun, Men, Thinking, Killing A Man, Understanding Why

The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all. Why not reach out to others in love and solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding? Why retreat into anxious introspection when, as Emerson might have said, there is a vast world outside to explore? Why spend so much time working on oneself when there is so much real work to be done?

- Barbara Ehrenreich

source: Barbara Ehrenreich (2009). “Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America”, p.76, Macmillan

topic: Real, Understanding, Might, Real Work, Understanding Why

I would simply ask why so many critics, so many writers, so many philosophers take such satisfaction in professing that the experience of a work of art is ineffable, that it escapes by definition all rational understanding; why are they so eager to concede without a struggle the defeat of knowledge; and where does their irrepressible need to belittle rational understanding come from, this rage to affirm the irreducibility of the work of art, or, to use a more suitable word, its transcendence.

- Pierre Bourdieu

topic: Art, Struggle, Understanding, Suitable, Irrepressible

I must admit, Peter, I have difficulty in understanding why an innocent man would want to spend twelve years as a rat.

- J. K. Rowling

topic: Men, Innocent Man, Years, Understanding Why

I like to know why a video has suddenly gone viral, why a song has broken, why a TV show is suddenly rating out of pattern... I'm pretty good at understanding why things are becoming popular.

- Simon Cowell

topic: Song, Tv Shows, Broken, Viral, Understanding Why