A Quote by Leo Strauss

One cannot refute what one has not thoroughly understood.

Leo Strauss

Quote Topics

Cannot Refute Thoroughly Understood

Quote Author

Leo Strauss
German - Philosopher
September 20, 1899 - October 18, 1973

Just as gold tarnished in depth (cf. Jms. 5:3) cannot be properly purified and restored to its proper brightness unless it is cast in the fire and thoroughly hammered with mallets, so when the soul has been tarnished with the rust of sin and become thoroughly useless it cannot be cleansed and recover its original beauty unless it meets many trials and enter into the furnace of tribulations.

Symeon the New Theologian

Love is a chemical reaction, but it cannot be fully understood or defined by science. And though a body cannot exist without a soul, it too cannot be fully understood or defined by science. Love is the most powerful form of energy, but science cannot decipher its elements. Yet the best cure for a sick soul is love, but even the most advanced physician cannot prescribe it as medicine.

Suzy Kassem

We can refute assertions, but who can refute silence?

Charles Dickens

Everybody had to be thoroughly understood before being accepted.

Joseph Conrad

Science cannot destroy the consciousness of freedom, without which there is no morality and no art, but it can refute it.

Isaiah Berlin

Do not imagine that these most difficult problems can be thoroughly understood by any one of us.

Maimonides

One age cannot be completely understood if all the others are not understood. The song of history can only be sung as a whole.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

She thoroughly understands what no other Church has ever understood, how to deal with enthusiasts.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

My father...was a man who understood all dogs thoroughly and treated them like human beings.

Flann O'Brien

For the sacrificed, in the hour of sacrifice, only one thing counts: faith-alone among enemies and skeptics. Faith, in spite of the humiliation which is both the necessary precondition and the consequence of faith, faith without any hope of compensation other than he can find in a faith which reality seems so thoroughly to refute.

Dag Hammarskjold

If you have a very commanding argument that you cannot refute, not to accept the argument is to act irrationally.

Robert F. Almeder

We cannot change, we cannot move away from what we are, until we thoroughly accept what we are. Then change seems to come about almost unnoticed.

Carl Rogers

A problem thoroughly understood is always fairly simple. Found your opinions on facts, not prejudices. We know too many things that are not true.

Charles Kettering

For he loved her and he understood that a woman cannot always live as a man. He understood that she cannot always think as he thought, walk as he walked, breathe the air that he took in. She would always be a different being from him, listening to a different music, hearing a different sound, familiar with a different element.

Philippa Gregory

The unity of effect or impression is a point of the greatest importance. It is clear, moreover, that this unity cannot be thoroughly preserved in productions whose perusal cannot be completed at one sitting.