“To understand anything is to find in it something which is our own.”

“That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts”

“In general, we seem to associate complexity with anything we find difficult to understand.”

“Animals and plants cannot understand our business, so we have denied that they can understand their own. What we call inorganic matter cannot understand the animals' and plants' business, we have therefore denied that it can understand anything whatever.”

“Our rational minds can never understand what has happened, but our hearts.. if we can keep them open to God, will find their own intuitive way.”

“It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.”

“We read literature for a lot of reasons, but two of the most compelling ones are to get out of ourselves and our own life stories and—equally important—to find ourselves by understanding our own life stories more clearly in the context of others’.”

“Something that you feel will find its own form.”

“Nothing is more important than the formation of fictional concepts, which teach us at last to understand our own.”

“The real job is not to understand foreign culture but to understand our own.”