"I wish to remind you that this system is based on understanding
Understanding must occupy the first place in this system. The more
you understand, the better the result of your work will be.
Understanding is a relative term. Everyone understands something at
every moment in his own way. But understandingmay be larger, and
larger, and still larger. In this sytem we call understanding a certain
possible maximum on a certain level of knowledge and being. As a rule
this maximum is too low; people's understanding is usually limited to only
one room, and they never get out of that room. But the understanding of
these ideas is very much beyond this one room...
...You should think of why you come here, what you want from this system
and why, what you can learn from it, why this sytem exists, why
I talk about this system, what I wish to achieve by talking about it. One has
to have a ceratin point of view about it all; it may be a wrong one, but
still one must have some idea."

"There is no 'real' understanding. Understanding is relative. It is like
temperature, it may be five degrees, ten degrees, fifteen degrees. You see
why ordinary language is no good and why we have to study a different
language? Because in ordinary language all words are taken as absolutes.
In reality there are differnt degrees of understanding. As I said, we can
understand better, and still better. Then if we want to understand still
better, we must change our being..."

"You see, definitions can seldom help and, as a matter of fact, we can
have very few definitions. This conviction that in order to understand
something it is necessary to define it is quite wrong, because most things
we cannot define, and the few that we can, we can define only relatively
with the help of other things. So, among an enormous quantity of things
we cannot define at all there are small islands of things we can define."

"The Fourth Way" by P.D.Ouspensky, Vintage Books Edition, March 1971, p.134-135