Quotes about understanding

page 15

“The hardest thing in the world to understand is income taxes.”

“when faced with a problem you do not understand, do any part of it you do understand, then look at it again.”

“Money speaks sense in a language all nations understand.”

“Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don't you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life's business.”

“Life isn't long enough to enjoy and understand all at the same time. You have to decide which is more important”

“Book lovers will understand me,
and they will know too that part of the pleasure
of a library lies in its very existence.”

“You understand my music.”

“In time we often become one with those we once failed to understand.”

“We couldn't understand because we were too far… and could not remember because we were traveling in the night of first ages, those ages that had gone, leaving hardly a sign… and no memories.”

“People who understand everything get no stories.”

“The bondage of the Negro brought captive from Africa is one of the greatest dramas in history, and the writer who merely sees in that ordeal something to approve or condemn fails to understand the evolution of the human race.”

“Using words to talk of words is like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself, on itself. Impossible. Confusing. Frustrating… but there are other ways to understanding.”

“He dunked his tea bag and watched the results critically. “I really must get a new supplier. This tea is pathetic. America just doesn’t understand tea at all.”

“Education, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.”

“There are some people who will never understand what
loyalty means. They could tell you what it was, of course,
but they will never know. They will never see it from the inside.
They couldn't imagine a world where something like that was real.”

“Normal: lacking in taste, compassion, understanding, kindness, and ordinary human decency.”

“Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated.”

“And then there is our personal history. Memories only we share. Things not another living soul would understand.”

“In truth, Freud sees nothing and understands nothing.”

“You're the one who doesn't understand, I've been standing on the edge with you for years.”

“And he understands. He understands why people hold hands: he’d always thought it was about possessiveness, saying This is mine. But it’s about maintaining contact. It is about speaking without words. It is about I want you with me and don’t go.”

“Don't try to understand me, just be grateful that you felt the warmth of Zaphod Beeblebrox's aura on your wonderstruck face.”

“I don't understand my feelings. I really don't. I don't understand how I could hate you so much after so much time. How, no matter how much I'd like to not hate you, I hate you even more. It grows.”

“There is a saying that to understand is to forgive, but that is an error, so Papa used to say. You must forgive in order to understand. Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibility of understanding.”

“It's easy to mistake understanding for empathy - we want empathy so badly. Maybe learning to make that distinction is part of growing up. It's hard and ugly to know somebody can understand you without even liking you.”

“We are afraid of losing what we have, whether it's our life or our possessions and property. But this fear evaporates when we understand that our life stories and the history of the world were written by the same hand.”

“the beautiful are found in the edge of a room
crumpled into spiders and needles and silence
and we can never understand why they
left, they were so
beautiful.

they dont make it,
the beautiful die young
and leave the ugly to their ugly lives.”

“You can clear out whatever obstacles are preventing you from living your most creative life, with the simple understanding that whatever is bad for you is probably also bad for your work.”

“I can see his pain, see it in the way he runs his fingers through his hair, over and over, and I understand what it costs him to hide it all.”

“Dogs make sense. They understand hierarchy and the need to cooperate. They come when you call them. A cat though—a cat will take your number and get back to you. Maybe. If he’s in a good mood.”

“It is understandable that the perspectives of men and women on safety are so different--men and women live in different worlds… at core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them.”

“Do you understand now why books are hated and feared? Because they reveal the pores on the face of life. The comfortable people want only the faces of the full moon, wax, faces without pores, hairless, expressionless.”

“Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.”

“There are some people who can receive a truth by no other way than to have their understanding shocked and insulted.”

“Gratitude, not understanding, is the secret to joy and equanimity.”

“Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.”

“We have to continue to learn. We have to be open. And we have to be ready to release our knowledge in order to come to a higher understanding of reality.”

“Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar situation here on this planet, it is because they have accepted a religious Faith or a secular Ideology (Ideologies are the modern form of Faiths) and just stopped thinking.”

“Neither the mouse nor the boy was the least bit surprised that each could understand the other. Two creatures who shared a love for motorcycles naturally spoke the same language.”

“Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers.”

“Those who have suffered understand suffering and therefore extend their hand.”

“I don’t understand hate. I’ve seen its power. I’ve known its wrath. I’ve even felt it coursing through my veins, pushing me on. But I don’t know where it comes from or why it lasts, how it can take hold in some people and grow.”

“Those who truly understand their faiths understand the stories are metaphorical.”

“The right understanding of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other.”

“I'm not broken, I'm ruined. Do you understand the difference? With broken maybe you can fix things. Ruined? All you can do is wait to bury me.”

“Love was the key to understanding all of the mysteries.”

“Everybody's got something. In the end, what choice does one really have but to understand that truth, to really take it in, and then shop for groceries, get a haircut, do one's work; get on with the business of one's life.

That's the hope, anyway.”

“However difficult it may be to accept what happens to us, one must understand that moments such as this give us the possibility for radical change in our behavior.”

“You have to understand what you’re missing before you can really feel a loss.”

“When you have just been told that the girl you love is definitely betrothed to another, you begin to understand how Anarchists must feel when the bomb goes off too soon.”

“i can't understand her"
well son, you might as well try to understand the sun”

“They say great themes make great novels.. but what these young writers don't understand is that there is no greater theme than men and women.”

“The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.”

“Most people don't cry when they're upset or frightened, but rather when they're frustrated. Your frustration is understandable. You've been through a most trying time." -Hodge”

“Regin to Fegley:

"I finally understand what a dickie-do is. Your gut does stick out more than your dickie do.”

“I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble.”

“A First Sign of the Beginning of Understanding is the Wish to Die.”

“No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one's life is nothing. Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins.”

“No one reads; if someone does read, he doesn't understand; if he understands, he immediately forgets.”

“Today I will go to wait for her again, because I cannot help it, because my whole being seems now to be bound up in the being of one so different from myself and yet so exquisitely familiar that I can scarely understand what has happened.”

“Let us study things that are no more. It is necessary to understand them, if only to avoid them.”

“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.”

“To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole;”

“So what's the point of using words nobody else knows or can say comfortably? I just don't understand that.”

“So books are real to me, too; they link me not just with other minds but with the vision of other minds, what those minds understand and see. I see their worlds as well as I see my own.”

“Maybe in order to understand sex fully/one has to risk being destroyed by it.”

“Why should things be easy to understand?”

“If you need to conceal your true nature to get in the door, understand that you'll probably have to conceal your true nature to keep that job.”

“She didn't bother to understand it all; it was--boring boring boring.”

“Have you ever felt really close to someone? So close that you can't understand why you and the other person have two separate bodies, two separate skins?”

“You never read Spider-Man? Accepting your true identity means understanding that you are a stranger to this world. A freak, ostracized by the very people you want to help.”

“But God will know the slow tread of an old couple’s love for each other, and understand how black shadows make part of its whole.”

“And he has to live like this on the edge of destruction, alone, with nobody at all to understand or pity him”

“It's only now that I realize that behaviour always has a context and precedents, it's what you do rather than what you are, although we often never recognise that context or understand what these precedents are.”

“There are five people you meet in heaven," the Blue Man suddenly said. "Each of us was in your life for a reason. You may not have known the reason at the time, and that is what heaven is for. For understanding your life on earth.”

“It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.”

“Keep your love of nature, for that is the true way to understand art more and more.”

“Human passions have mysterious ways, in children as well as grown-ups. Those affected by them can’t explain them, and those who haven’t known them have no understanding of them at all.”

“Knowing isn’t understanding”

“I don't understand why I'm not dead. When your heart breaks, you should die”

“Do you want to understand how to swim, or do you want to jump in and start swimming? Only people who are afraid of the water want to understand it. Other people jump in and get wet.”

“The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.”

“Just curious how much I'm going for these days," Leo said. "I mean, I can understand not being as pricey as Percy or Jason, maybe… but am I worth, like, two Franks, or three Franks?”

“… I do not tell you often enough, dear Mother, how very grateful I am that I am yours. It is a rare parent
who would offer a child such latitude and understanding. It is an even rarer one who calls a daughter
friend. I do love you, dear Mama.”

“Friends are a weird thing. It seems like they know all about you, but then they don’t understand you at all.”

“We all should know that diversity makes for a rich tapestry, and we must understand that all the threads of the tapestry are equal in value no matter what their color.”

“There are some stories you can't hear enough. They are the same every time you hear them. But you are not. That's one reliable way of understanding time.”

“I’ve learned to value failed conversations, missed connections, confusions. What remains is what’s unsaid, what’s underneath. Understanding on another level of being.”

“Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to understand sex.”

“You read too much and understand too little.”

“This is the problem of all great revelations: their significance so often exceeds the frame of our comprehension. We understand only after, always after. Not simply when it is too late, but precisely because it is too late.”

“There was one thing my murderer didn't understand; he didn't understand how much a father could love his child.”

“While it is true that most people never see or understand the difference they make, or sometimes only imagine their actions having a tiny effect, every single action a person takes has far-reaching consequences.”

“Readers understand that the books celebrate female power. In the romance novel, the woman always wins. With courage, intelligence and gentleness she brings the most dangerous creature on the earth, the human male, to his knees.”

“It's funny how you can think you know someone pretty well, and then something happens or they do something that makes you understand that you didn't really know them at all.”

“I want to hold you like a kitten in my shirt, and still I want to spread your thighs and plow ye like a rotting bull. I dinna understand myself.”

“I think people understand things different when they get older. It’s not a question of getting soft, or seeing things in the gray areas instead of black and white. I really believe I’m just understanding things different. Better.”

“Everyone, he went on, speaks a language he does not understand, but which now and then is understood by others. That is enough to permit one to exist and at least to be misunderstood.”

“Everyone is a comedy. If people are laughing at you, they just don't quite understand the joke that is themselves.”