Quotes about misunderstand (265 quotes)

“Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”

Carl Sagan book Pale Blue Dot

Source: Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994), p. 8, Supplemental image at randi.org http://www.randi.org/images/122801-BlueDot.jpg

Love , Life , World , Religion

“Every one interprets everything in terms of his own experience. If you say anything which does not touch a precisely similar spot in another man's brain, he either misunderstands you, or doesn't understand you at all.”

Aleister Crowley book Diary of a Drug Fiend

Source: Diary of a Drug Fiend

Understanding

“Never choose anyone as a friend without

understanding

and never lose him/her because of

misunderstanding.”

Stephie Pahlavi Zan

Understanding

“Understanding, as we understand it, is misunderstanding.”

Elias Canetti book Auto-da-Fé

Auto-da-Fé

Understanding

“Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate.”

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher

Variant: Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate.

Happy , Relationship , Hostility , Sun

“Harvard's motto is "Veritas." Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate with total attention on its pursuit. And even while it eludes us, the illusion still lingers of knowing it and leads to many misunderstandings. Also, truth is seldom pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter. There is some bitterness in my speech today, too. But I want to stress that it comes not from an adversary but from a friend.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Harvard University address (1978)

Truth

“Always remember that it is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood: there will always be some who misunderstand you.”

Karl Popper (1902–1994) Austrian-British philosopher of science

Page 29
Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography (1976)

Way

“We must fight the patriarchal misunderstanding of God.”

Hans Küng (1928) Swiss Catholic priest, theologian and author

Newsweek interview, July 8, 1991
Context: If you cannot see that divinity includes male and female characteristics and at the same time transcends them, you have bad consequences. Rome and Cardinal O'Connor base the exclusion of women priests on the idea that God is the Father and Jesus is His Son, there were only male disciples, etc. They are defending a patriarchal Church with a patriarchal God. We must fight the patriarchal misunderstanding of God.

God , Fight

“Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding”

Diane Arbus (1923–1971) American photographer and author

Variant: Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding.

Relationship , Romantic , Love , Understanding

“In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood”

Henry David Thoreau A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

Source: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

Silence

“Life is but a series of misunderstandings.”

Denis Diderot book Jacques the Fatalist

Source: Jacques the Fatalist

Life

“The proper basis for marriage is a mutual misunderstanding.”

Oscar Wilde book Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories

Source: Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories

Marriage

“The overall purpose of human communication is - or should be - reconciliation. It should ultimately serve to lower or remove the walls of misunderstanding which unduly separate us human beings, one from another.”

M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) American psychiatrist

Source: The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace

Communication

“Nothing is more natural than mutual misunderstanding; the contrary is always surprising. I believe that one never agrees on anything except by mistake, and that all harmony among human beings is the happy fruit of an error.”

Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher

Source: The Art of Poetry

Error , Nature , Happiness

“We're not really intruding," he called down. "This is all a big misunderstanding."
"Stop right there!" shouted one of them.
Skulduggery held his hand to an ear he didn't have.
"What's that?"
"Stop!"
"Keep going?"
"STOP!"
"OK, we'll keep going.”

Derek Landy (1974) Irish children's writer

Source: Death Bringer

“The very word "Christianity" is a misunderstanding — in truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Antichrist

This has commonly been paraphrased: The last Christian died on the cross.
Sec. 39
The Antichrist (1888)

Truth

“To avoid misunderstanding, it may be proper to say that this proclamation, so far as it relates to State governments, has no reference to States wherein loyal State governments have all the while been maintained. And for the same reason, it may be proper to further say that whether members sent to Congress from any State shall be admitted to seats, constitutionally rests exclusively with the respective Houses, and not to any extent with the Executive. And still further, that this proclamation is intended to present the people of the States wherein the national authority has been suspended, and loyal State governments have been subverted, a mode in and by which the national authority and loyal State governments may be re-established within said States, or in any of them; and, while the mode presented is the best the Executive can suggest with his present impressions, it must not be understood that no other possible mode would be acceptable.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction (1863)

People , Housing

“We should not speak so that it is possible for the audience to understand us, but so that it is impossible for them to misunderstand us.”
Quare non ut intellegere possit sed ne omnino possit non intellegere curandum.

Quintilian (35–96) ancient Roman rhetor

Book VIII, Chapter II, 24
De Institutione Oratoria (c. 95 AD)

Understanding

“What can a man say about woman, his own opposite? I mean of course something sensible, that is outside the sexual program, free of resentment, illusion, and theory. Where is the man to be found capable of such superiority? Woman always stands just where the man's shadow falls, so that he is only too liable to confuse the two. Then, when he tries to repair this misunderstanding, he overvalues her and believes her the most desirable thing in the world.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

Source: "Woman in Europe" (1927), P. 236

World

“So, in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride, the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

Speech to the National Association of Evangelicals (8 March 1983)
1980s, First term of office (1981–1985)

History , Evil

“One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own ugly way.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 98e

Age , Way

“Misunderstanding of the present is the inevitable consequence of ignorance of the past. But a man may wear himself out just as fruitlessly in seeking to understand the past, if he is totally ignorant of the present…This faculty of understanding the living is, in very truth, the master quality of the historian.”

Marc Bloch (1886–1944) French historian, medievalist, and historiographer

The Historian's Craft, pg.43

Truth , Understanding , Past

“Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism : they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Letter One (17 February 1903)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

Life , People , Art

“A frequent source of misunderstanding has to do with the interpretation of fuzzy logic. The problem is that the term fuzzy logic has two different meanings. More specifically, in a narrow sense, fuzzy logic, FLn, is a logical system which may be viewed as an extension and generalization of classical multivalued logics. But in a wider sense, fuzzy logic, FLw is almost synonymous with the theory of fuzzy sets. In this context, what is important to recognize is that: (a) FLw is much broader than FLn and subsumes FLn as one of its branches; (b) the agenda of FLn is very different from the agendas of classical multivalued logics; and (c) at this juncture, the term fuzzy logic is usually used in its wide rather than narrow sense, effectively equating fuzzy logic with FLw</sub”

Lotfi A. Zadeh (1921–2017) Electrical engineer and computer scientist

Zadeh (1995) in Foreword of George J. Klir Fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic: theory and applications.
1990s

Problem , Sense

“Santayana said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Really? Human nature being what it is, isn't it hopeless to expect that we can do better regardless of whether we remember anything or not? And what if what we remember leads us to false analogies and misunderstandings? I prefer: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility."”

Errol Morris (1948) American filmmaker and writer

Or how about this: "Those who cannot condemn the past repeat it in order to remember it."
Source: The Grump (no. 1) http://www.errolmorris.com/content/grump/grump1.html

Nature , Sense , Past , Falseness

“Do you think it interests me that this painting represents two figures? These two figures existed, they exist no more. The sight of them gave me an initial emotion, little by little their real presence grew indistinct they became a fiction for me, then they disappeared, or rather, were turned into problems of all kinds. For me they are no longer two figures but shapes and colours, don’t misunderstand me, shapes and colours, though, that sum up the idea of the two figures and preserve the vibration of their”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

Boisgeloup, winter 1934
Richard Friedenthal, (1963, p. 258)
Quotes, 1930's, "Conversations avec Picasso," 1934–35

Idea , Problem , Thinking , Winter

“I suppose every child has a world of his own — and every man, too, for the matter of that. I wonder if that's the cause for all the misunderstanding there is in Life?”

Lewis Carroll book Sylvie and Bruno

Source: Sylvie and Bruno (1889), Chapter 4 : A Cunning Conspiracy

Life , World

“The rude, discursive Thinker is the Scholastic (Schoolman Logician). The true Scholastic is a mystical Subtlist; out of logical Atoms he builds his Universe; he annihilates all living Nature, to put an Artifice of Thoughts (Gedankenkunststuck, literally Conjuror's-trick of Thoughts) in its room. His aim is an infinite Automaton. Opposite to him is the rude, intuitive Poet: this is a mystical Macrologist: he hates rules and fixed form; a wild, violent life reigns instead of it in Nature; all is animate, no law; wilfulness and wonder everywhere. He is merely dynamical. Thus does the Philosophic Spirit arise at first, in altogether separate masses. In the second stage of culture these masses begin to come in contact, multifariously enough; and, as in the union of infinite Extremes, the Finite, the Limited arises, so here also arise "Eclectic Philosophers" without number; the time of misunderstanding begins. The most limited is, in this stage, the most important, the purest Philosopher of the second stage. This class occupies itself wholly with the actual, present world, in the strictest sense. The Philosophers of the first class look down with contempt on those of the second; say, they are a little of everything, and so nothing; hold their views as the results of weakness, as Inconsequentism. On the contrary, the second class, in their turn, pity the first; lay the blame on their visionary enthusiasm, which they say is absurd, even to insanity.”

Novalis (1772–1801) German poet and writer

Pupils at Sais (1799)

Life , Hate , World , Law

“Soon after my arrival in Moscow I had an hour's conversation with Lenin in English, which he speaks fairly well… I have never met a personage so destitute of self-importance. He looks at his visitors very closely, and screws up one eye, which seems to increase alarmingly the penetrating power of the other. He laughs a great deal; at first his laugh seems merely friendly and jolly, but gradually I came to feel it rather grim. He is dictatorial, calm, incapable of fear, extraordinarily devoid of self-seeking, an embodied theory. The materialist conception of history, one feels, is his life-blood. He resembles a professor in his desire to have the theory understood and in his fury with those who misunderstand or disagree, as also in his love of expounding, I got the impression that he despises a great many people and is an intellectual aristocrat.
…When I suggested that whatever is possible in England can be achieved without bloodshed, he waved aside the suggestion as fantastic… He described the division between rich and poor peasants, and the Government propaganda among the latter against the former, leading to acts of violence which he seemed to find amusing.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Part I, Ch. 3: Lenin, Trotsky and Gorky
1920s, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (1920)

Love , Life , People , Fear

“Fights between individuals, as well as governments and nations, invariably result from misunderstandings in the broadest interpretation of this term. Misunderstandings are always caused by the inability of appreciating one another's point of view. This again is due to the ignorance of those concerned, not so much in their own, as in their mutual fields. The peril of a clash is aggravated by a more or less predominant sense of combativeness, posed by every human being. To resist this inherent fighting tendency the best way is to dispel ignorance of the doings of others by a systematic spread of general knowledge. With this object in view, it is most important to aid exchange of thought and intercourse.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

A Means for Furthering Peace (1905)

Way , Knowledge , Sense , Fight

“I want to reach people and express myself. You have to put up with the risk of being misunderstood if you are going to try to communicate. You have to put up with people projecting their own ideas, attitudes, misunderstanding you. But it's worth being a public fool if that's all you can be in order to communicate yourself.”

Edie Sedgwick (1943–1971) Socialite, actress, model

Edie : Girl On Fire (2006)

People , Fools , Communication , Idea

“It is thus seen that the assault upon and reduction of Fort Sumter was in no sense a matter of self-defense on the part of the assailants. They well knew that the garrison in the fort could by no possibility commit aggression upon them. They knew-they were expressly notified-that the giving of bread to the few brave and hungry men of the garrison was all which would on that occasion be attempted, unless themselves, by resisting so much, should provoke more. They knew that this Government desired to keep the garrison in the fort, not to assail them, but merely to maintain visible possession, and thus to preserve the Union from actual and immediate dissolution, trusting, as hereinbefore stated, to time, discussion, and the ballot box for final adjustment; and they assailed and reduced the fort for precisely the reverse object — to drive out the visible authority of the Federal Union, and thus force it to immediate dissolution. That this was their object the Executive well understood; and having said to them in the inaugural address, "You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors," he took pains not only to keep this declaration good, but also to keep the case so free from the power of ingenious sophistry as that the world should not be able to misunderstand it. By the affair at Fort Sumter, with its surrounding circumstances, that point was reached. Then and thereby the assailants of the Government began the conflict of arms, without a gun in sight or in expectancy to return their fire, save only the few in the fort, sent to that harbor years before for their own protection, and still ready to give that protection in whatever was lawful. In this act, discarding all else, they have forced upon the country the distinct issue, "Immediate dissolution or blood."”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Fourth of July Address to Congress (1861)

Men , Pain , World , Law

“For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician's own failings.
And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright's sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2008, A More Perfect Union (March 2008)

Life , Women , Men , People

“I'm really very happy if people can connect at all to anything I do. I don't really mind if people mishear lyrics or misunderstand what the story is. I think that's what you have to let go of when you send it out in the world.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Source: As quoted in "Kate Bush Speaks" by Owen Myers in Fader (23 November 2016)
Context: I'm really very happy if people can connect at all to anything I do. I don't really mind if people mishear lyrics or misunderstand what the story is. I think that's what you have to let go of when you send it out in the world. I'm sure with a lot of paintings, people don't understand what the painter originally meant, and I don't really think that matters. I just think if you feel something, that's really the ideal goal. If that happens, then I'm really happy.

People , World , Thinking , Happiness

“It just always reveals to me how many misconceptions and what a misunderstanding there is about what feminism is. Feminism is about giving women choice. Feminism is not a stick with which to beat other women with. It’s about freedom, it’s about liberation, it’s about equality. I really don’t know what my tits have to do with it. It’s very confusing.”

Emma Watson (1990) British actress and model

"Actress Emma Watson says revealing photo does not undermine feminism" http://www.reuters.com/article/us-people-emmawatson-idUSKBN16C0QV, Reuters, in response to critics of her photos in Vogue magazine (March 5, 2017)

Women , Freedom

“Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see.
It's getting hard to be someone but it all works out.
It doesn't matter much to me. Let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields.
Nothing is real and nothing to get hung about.
Strawberry Fields forever.”

John Lennon (1940–1980) English singer and songwriter

"Strawberry Fields Forever" (1967)
Lyrics

“It is better to understand a little than to misunderstand a lot.”

Anatole France (1844–1924) French writer

Understanding

“Misunderstanding between two friends is an opportunity to speak reality.”

Yusuf Cornelius Otijenu

Reality

“The operation of the Church is entirely set up for the sinner; which creates much misunderstanding among the smug.”
(August 9, 1955)”

Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) American novelist, short story writer

“I'm so misunderstood that people misunderstand me even when I tell them I'm misunderstood.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

People

“They stared at each other, wanting each other, drawn to each other, but their silent shout of love went unheard in the roar of misunderstanding, and the clatter of culturally ingrained beliefs.”

Jean M. Auel book The Mammoth Hunters

Source: The Mammoth Hunters

Love

“Don't misunderstand me. I am not scoffing at goodness, which is far more difficult to explain than evil, and far more complicated. But sometimes it's hard to put up with.”

Margaret Atwood book The Blind Assassin

Source: The Blind Assassin

Evil

“It was not death she feared. It was misunderstanding.”

Zora Neale Hurston book Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

Death , Fear

“And your defect is a propensity to hate everybody."
"And yours," he replied with a smile, "is willfully to misunderstand them.”

Jane Austen book Pride and Prejudice

Source: Pride and Prejudice

Hate , Smile

“Understanding is but the sum of misunderstandings.”

Haruki Murakami book Sputnik Sweetheart

Source: Sputnik Sweetheart

Understanding

“But it struck him that people are not really dead until they are felt to be dead. As long as there is some misunderstanding about them, they possess a sort of immortality.”

E.M. Forster book A Passage to India

Source: A Passage to India

People , Dead

“We're all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.”

Rudyard Kipling book The Light That Failed

Source: The Light That Failed

Sea

“If you want that good feeling that comes from doing things for other folks then you have to pay for it in abuse and misunderstanding.”

Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) American folklorist, novelist, short story writer

Feeling

“Don’t try to understand! It’s enough if you do not misunderstand.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Understanding

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

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Source: Beloved

Understanding

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

Franz Kafka book The Trial

Source: The Trial (1920)

Understanding

“The word love has by no means the same sense for both sexes, and this is one cause of the serious misunderstandings that divide them.”

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist

Love , Sex , Sense

“Mythology may, in a real sense, be defined as other people's religion. And religion may, in a sense, be understood as popular misunderstanding of mythology. (8)”

Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) American mythologist, writer and lecturer

Source: Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

People , Religion , Sense

“Misunderstanding women is a clear sign of scant virility.”

Italo Svevo book Zeno's Conscience

Source: Zeno's Conscience

Women

“There is only one good thing in life, and that is love. And how you misunderstand it! how you spoil it! You treat it as something solemn like a sacrament, or something to be bought, like a dress.”

Guy De Maupassant (1850–1893) French writer

"The Love of Long Ago"

Love , Life

“when however small a measure of jealousy is mixed with misunderstanding, there is always going to be trouble.”

John Irving book A Prayer for Owen Meany

Source: A Prayer for Owen Meany

Jealousy

“I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

Thinking , Change , Reading

“We're all born with selfish desires, so we can all relate to those feelings in others. But kindness is something made individually by each person… so it's easy to misunderstand when others are trying to be kind to you.”

Natsuki Takaya (1973) Manga artist

Source: Fruits Basket Ultimate Edition, Vol. 3

Feeling , Personality , Selfishness

“For a man to think he can fulfil his destiny without a woman is a misunderstanding, a miscalculation; it is reckless and folly. Certainly a woman is not everthing, but everything depends on her.”

Yasmina Khadra book What the Day Owes the Night

Source: Ce que le jour doit à la nuit

Thinking , Dependency

“To view the opposition as dangerous is to misunderstand the basic concepts of democracy. To oppress the opposition is to assault the very foundation of democracy.”

Aung San Suu Kyi book Letters from Burma

Source: Letters from Burma

Democracy

“Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963)
Context: I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

People , Understanding

“Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It's everyone's, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet.”

Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

Truth , Thinking

“What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Deep , World , Tear , Laughter

“But they were fated to misunderstand each other.”

Rafael Sabatini book Captain Blood

Source: Captain Blood

Fate

“Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.”

John Ruskin (1819–1900) English writer and art critic

A Joy for Ever, note 6 (1857).
Context: For certainly it is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his reader is sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words, or his reader will certainly misunderstand them.

“I know that when people pull apart, they usually employ misunderstanding as a weapon, deliberately getting hold of the stick's wrong end, impaling themselves on its point in order to prove the perfidy of the other.”

Salman Rushdie Fury

Source: Fury

People

“Besides," he said breezily, "were it not for misunderstandings, we would be sadly lacking in great literature."
She looked at him questioningly.
"Where would Romeo and Juliet be?"
"Alive.”

Julia Quinn (1970) American novelist

Source: Ten Things I Love About You

Literature

“It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.”

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

People , Truth , Failure

“Why is it that there are always these problems and misunderstandings between men and women? Surely it would have been better if God had made only one sort of person, and the children had come by some other means, with the rain perhaps.”

Alexander McCall Smith book The Kalahari Typing School for Men

Source: The Kalahari Typing School for Men

Women , Men , God , Children

“And they lived happily (aside from a few normal disagreements, misunderstandings, pouts, silent treatments, and unexpected calamities) ever after.”

Jean Ferris (1939–2015) American children's writer

Source: Twice Upon a Marigold

“Where men of fine feeling are concerned there is seldom misunderstanding.”

John Paul Jones (1747–1792) American naval officer

Letter from Jones to the Marquis de Lafayette, (1 May 1779)

Men , Feeling

“Throughout his last half-dozen books, for example, Arthur Koestler has been conducting a campaign against his own misunderstanding of Darwinism. He hopes to find some ordering force, constraining evolution to certain directions and overriding the influence of natural selection. […] Darwinism is not the theory of capricious change that Koestler imagines. Random variation may be the raw material of change, but natural selection builds good design by rejecting most variants while accepting and accumulating the few that improve adaptation to local environments.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Panda's Thumb

"Double Trouble", pp. 38–40
The Panda's Thumb (1980)

Books , Hope , Imagination , Nature

“…the claims made by many nowadays that any manifestation of hatred against Jews in any geographic location on Earth and in any historical period is "anti-Semitism" smacks of a gross misunderstanding of the European history of anti-Semitism.”

Joseph Massad (1963) Associate Professor of Arab Studies

Massad, in "Semites and anti-Semites, that is the question," Al-Ahram, 2004
On Anti-Semitism

History

“I can only say that you must have totally renounced all trust in the operations of the human reason; an attitude which, while it is bad Christianity and also infernal nonsense, is oddly enough bad Positivism too, unless I misunderstand that system.”

Edmund Clerihew Bentley book Trent's Last Case

Source: Trent's Last Case (1912), Chapter XVI: "The Last Straw"

“Apparently, as in so many ancient battles, the beaten side were the victims of misunderstanding and the fate of the day was decided against them before the bulk of the forces realised that a serious engagement had begun. Reserves descended from the hills too late to achieve victory, but in good time to be massacred in the rout.”

Winston S. Churchill book A History of the English-Speaking Peoples

On the Battle of Mons Graupius, which ended British resistance to Roman rule, Vol I; The Birth of Britain.
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1956–58)

Fate , Time , Victory

“I want very much to tell, to talk about, the wholeness inside every human being. It's a strange thing that every human being has a sort of dignity or wholeness in him, and out of that develops relationships to other human beings, tensions, misunderstandings, tenderness, coming in contact, touching and being touched, the cutting off of a contact and what happens then.”

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) Swedish filmmaker

As quoted in Ingmar Bergman Directs (1972) by John Simon

“I must also call your attention to the fact that it is crucial for my viewpoint that human behavior is to a large extent charged with a considerable amount of energy, but that in contrast to Freud I do not consider this energy to be sexual, but the vital energy within any organism which, according to biological laws, gives man the desire to live, and that means to adapt himself to the social necessities of his society. To go back to what I consider to be the misunderstanding, it has never been my position that society only deforms or manifests that which is already there. If we make the distinction between human necessities in general and human desires in particular then indeed, society creates particular desires which, however, follow the general laws of the necessities rooted in human nature.”

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) German social psychologist and psychoanalyst

Human Nature and Social Theory (1969)

Law , Behavior , Nature

“Those who decry the rule of law as a Western principle or an imported construct, misunderstand the concept. It is about abiding by a set of standards for the well-being of society as a whole.”

Joni Madraiwiwi (1957–2016) Fijian politician

Speech to the Fiji Law Society, 2 July 2005.

Law

“For the first time I understood Goethe’s laughter, the laughter of the immortals. It was a laughter without an object. It was simply light and lucidity. It was that which is left over when a true man has passed through all the sufferings, vices, mistakes, passions, and misunderstandings of men and got through to eternity and the world of space. And eternity was nothing else than the redemption of time, its return to innocence, so to speak, and its transformation again to space.”

Hermann Hesse book Steppenwolf

Source: Steppenwolf (1927), p. 154

Men , World , Laughter , Light

“One long-past innocent day, in my prefolly youth, I came upon a statement in an undistinguished textbook on psychiatry that, as when Kant read Hume, woke me forever from my garden-of-eden slumber. "The psychotic does not merely think he sees four blue bivalves with floppy wings wandering up the wall; he does see them. An hallucination is not, strictly speaking, manufactured in the brain; it is received by the brain, like any 'real' sense datum, and the patient act in response to this to-him-very-real perception of reality in as logical a way as we do to our sense data. In any way to suppose he only 'thinks he sees it' is to misunderstand totally the experience of psychosis."”

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) American author

"Drugs, Hallucinations, and the Quest for Reality" (1964) quoting an unknown psychiatric text, reprinted in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick (1995) Lawrence Sutin, ed.

Youth , Way , Thinking , Reality

“In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 4

World , Understanding , Business , Science

“Time travel destabilizes history.
History is a child of contingency; so many events depend on critical misunderstandings or transient encounters that even the apocryphal butterfly’s wing is apt to stir up a storm in short order.”

Charles Stross book Singularity Sky

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 8, “Confessions” (p. 177)

Travel , History , Time , Dependency

“I can understand myself in believing, although in addition I can in a relative misunderstanding comprehend the human aspect of this life: but comprehend faith or comprehend Christ, I cannot.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Source: 1840s, Two Ethical-Religious Minor Essays (1849), p. 65

Life , Faith , Understanding , Christ

“It is idle to say you are only fining a man a farthing, if he chooses to say it is his lucky farthing. It is waste of breath to call a thing a rag when he calls it a flag. This is the fallacy of those who, like Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee, the able American critic, imagine that a war must be a misunderstanding, which social intercourse and explanation would have set right.”

Gerald Stanley Lee (1862–1944) Americna minister

G. K. Chesterton, "Is the War Just a Misunderstanding" (January 29, 1916), reported in The collected works of G. K. Chesterton: Volume 30 (1988), p. 366.
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War , Imagination