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Contemplative vs Understanding - What's the difference?

contemplative | understanding |

As adjectives the difference between contemplative and understanding

is that contemplative is inclined to contemplate; introspective and thoughtful; meditative while understanding is showing compassion.

As nouns the difference between contemplative and understanding

is that contemplative is someone who has dedicated themselves to religious contemplation while understanding is (uncountable) mental, sometimes emotional process of comprehension, assimilation of knowledge, which is subjective by its nature.

As a verb understanding is

.

contemplative

English

Adjective

(en adjective)
  • Inclined to contemplate; introspective and thoughtful; meditative.
  • * 1873 , (John Stuart Mill), Autobiography , Chapter 5:
  • Compared with the greatest poets, he may be said to be the poet of unpoetical natures, possessed of quiet and contemplative tastes. But unpoetical natures are precisely those which require poetic cultivation. This cultivation Wordsworth is much more fitted to give, than poets who are intrinsically far more poets than he.
  • Pertaining especially to a contemplative Roman Catholic religious or one of the contemplative Roman Catholic religious orders.
  • * 1870 , (Charles Dickens), The Mystery of Edwin Drood , Chapter 3:
  • Whether the nuns of yore, being of a submissive rather than a stiff-necked generation, habitually bent their contemplative heads to avoid collision with the beams in the low ceilings of the many chambers of their House [...] may be matters of interest to its haunting ghosts (if any), but constitute no item in Miss Twinkleton's half-yearly accounts.
  • Relating to, or having the power of, contemplation.
  • contemplative faculties

    Noun

    (en noun)
  • Someone who has dedicated themselves to religious contemplation.
  • * 2009 , (Karen Armstrong), The Case for God , Vintage 2010, p. 112:
  • The contemplative must not expect exotic feelings, visions or heavenly voices; these did not come from God but from his own fevered imagination and would merely distract him from his true objective [...].
    ----

    understanding

    Noun

  • (uncountable) Mental, sometimes emotional process of comprehension, assimilation of knowledge, which is subjective by its nature.
  • (countable) Reason or intelligence, ability to grasp the full meaning of knowledge, ability to infer.
  • (countable) Opinion, judgement or outlook.
  • * {{quote-magazine, date=2013-08-03, volume=408, issue=8847, magazine=(The Economist)
  • , title= The machine of a new soul , passage=The yawning gap in neuroscientists’ understanding of their topic is in the intermediate scale of the brain’s anatomy. Science has a passable knowledge of how individual nerve cells, known as neurons, work. It also knows which visible lobes and ganglia of the brain do what. But how the neurons are organised in these lobes and ganglia remains obscure.}}
  • (countable) An informal contract, mutual agreement.
  • (countable) A reconciliation of differences.
  • (uncountable) Sympathy.
  • All that people individually sense and feel of themselves.
  • See also

    * intellection

    Adjective

    (en adjective)
  • Showing compassion.
  • Verb

    (head)
  • * {{quote-magazine, date=2013-06-07, author=David Simpson
  • , volume=188, issue=26, page=36, magazine=(The Guardian Weekly) , title= Fantasy of navigation , passage=It is tempting to speculate about the incentives or compulsions that might explain why anyone would take to the skies in [the] basket [of a balloon]: […];  […]; or perhaps to muse on the irrelevance of the borders that separate nation states and keep people from understanding their shared environment.}}