Understanding Quotes

“We're fascinated by the words--but where we meet is in the silence behind them.”
― ram dass

“I examined the poets, and I look on them as people whose talent overawes both themselves and others, people who present themselves as wise men and are taken as such, when they are nothing of the sort.

From poets, I moved to artists. No one was more ignorant about the arts than I; no one was more convinced that artists possessed really beautiful secrets. However, I noticed that their condition was no better than that of the poets and that both of them have the same misconceptions. Because the most skillful among them excel in their specialty, they look upon themselves as the wisest of men. In my eyes, this presumption completely tarnished their knowledge. As a result, putting myself in the place of the oracle and asking myself what I would prefer to be — what I was or what they were, to know what they have learned or to know that I know nothing — I replied to myself and to the god: I wish to remain who I am.

We do not know — neither the sophists, nor the orators, nor the artists, nor I— what the True, the Good, and the Beautiful are. But there is this difference between us: although these people know nothing, they all believe they know something; whereas, I, if I know nothing, at least have no doubts about it. As a result, all this superiority in wisdom which the oracle has attributed to me reduces itself to the single point that I am strongly convinced that I am ignorant of what I do not know.”
― Socrates

“Then why do you want to know?"

"Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“There’s nothing as significant as a human face. Nor as eloquent. We can never really know another person, except by our first glance at him. Because, in that glance, we know everything. Even though we’re not always wise enough to unravel the knowledge.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“...treat people with understanding when you can, and fake it when you can't
until you do understand.”
― Kim Harrison

“Death doesn't exist. It never did, it never will. But we've drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we've got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing.”
― Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

“No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion

“When you were in love, you were capable of learning everything and of knowing things you had never dared even to think, because love was the key to understanding all of the mysteries.”
― Paulo Coelho, Brida

“I sat with my anger long enough until she told me her real name was grief.”
― C.S. Lewis

“No one will understand you. It is not, ultimately, that important. What is important is that you understand you.”
― Matt Haig, The Humans

“None of us can choose where we shall love...”
― Susan Kay, Phantom

“I am afraid that our eyes are bigger than our stomachs, and that we have more curiosity than understanding. We grasp at everything, but catch nothing except wind.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.”
― immanuel kant, Critique of Pure Reason

“Why should things be easy to understand?”
― Thomas Pynchon

“It isn't normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.”
― Abraham Harold Maslow

“Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections

“She's a woman, you're a dude. You're not supposed to understand her. That's not what she's after.... She doesn't want you to understand her. She knows that's impossible. She just wants you to understand yourself. Everything else is negotiable.”
― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

“I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“Friends ask you questions; enemies question you.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.”
― Milan Kundera, Laughable Loves

“And we all know love is a glass which makes even a monster appear fascinating.”
― Alberto Moravia, The Woman of Rome

“If you understood everything I said, you’d be me”
― Miles Davis

“If there were a little more silence, if we all kept quiet...maybe we could understand something.”
― Federico Fellini

“We really have to understand the person we want to love. If our love is only a will to possess, it is not love. If we only think of ourselves, if we know only our own needs and ignore the needs of the other person, we cannot love. We must look deeply in order to see and understand the needs, aspirations, and suffering of the person we love. This is the ground of real love. You cannot resist loving another person when you really understand him or her.

From time to time, sit close to the one you love, hold his or her hand, and ask, 'Darling, do I understand you enough? Or am I making you suffer? Please tell me so that I can learn to love you properly. I don't want to make you suffer, and if I do so because of my ignorance, please tell me so that I can love you better, so that you can be happy." If you say this in a voice that communicates your real openness to understand, the other person may cry.

That is a good sign, because it means the door of understanding is opening and everything will be possible again.

Maybe a father does not have time or is not brave enough to ask his son such a question. Then the love between them will not be as full as it could be. We need courage to ask these questions, but if we don't ask, the more we love, the more we may destroy the people we are trying to love. True love needs understanding. With understanding, the one we love will certainly flower.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life

“I stopped. She was bleeding after all. Perfect lines crossed her wrists, not near any crucial veins, but enough to leave wet red tracks across her skin. She hadn;t hit her veins when she did this; death hadn't been her goal.”
― Richelle Mead, Vampire Academy

“To learn is not to know; there are the learners and the learned. Memory makes the one, philosophy the others.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“القراءة المبالغ فيها لا تجعل منا أذكياء. بعض الناس يبتلعون الكتب, وهم يفعلون ذلك بدون فاصل للتفكير الضروري. وهو ضروري لكي يهضم المقروء ويبنى ويتبنى ويُفهم”
― علي عزت بيجوفيتش, هروبي إلى الحرية

“Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.”
― Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety

“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

“To learn to see- to accustom the eye to calmness, to patience, and to allow things to come up to it; to defer judgment, and to acquire the habit of approaching and grasping an individual case from all sides. This is the first preparatory schooling of intellectuality. One must not respond immediately to a stimulus; one must acquire a command of the obstructing and isolating instincts.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols