Quotes About Understanding

Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those who think they can talk sense.

Friends make pretence of following to the grave but before one is in it, their minds are turned and making the best of their way back to life and living people and things they understand.

The greatest thing in family life is to take a hint when a hint is intended-and not to take a hint when a hint isn't intended.

There are tones of voices that mean more than words.

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.

Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.

Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.

Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those who think they talk sense.

I'm not confused. I'm just well mixed.

Yelling at living things does tend to kill the spirit in them. Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will break our hearts...

Anger blows out the lamp of the mind.

Reason, Observation, and Experience — the Holy Trinity of Science.

No one infers a god from the simple, from the known, from what is understood, but from the complex, from the unknown, and incomprehensible. Our ignorance is God; what we know is science.

The sciences are not sectarian. People do not persecute each other on account of disagreements in mathematics. Families are not divided about botany, and astronomy does not even tend to make a man hate his father and mother. It is what people do not know, that they persecute each other about. Science will bring, not a sword, but peace.

Inspiration is only necessary to give authority to that which is repugnant to human reason.

We don't love each other; we love the idea we have of each other. Very few humans understand this or can bear to contemplate it. They have blind faith in their own powers of creation. All love, ultimately, is self-love.

Like most writers, I tend to find out what I feel on a subject by writing about it. It is how we interpret the world, how we make sense of it.

She thought it might be the very first time that Strike had ever given any indication that he saw her as a woman, and she silently filed away the exchange to pore over later, in solitude.

I think marriage is nearly always an unfathomable entity, even to the people inside it.

Women, in his experience, often expected you to understand that it was a measure of how much they loved you that they tried their damnedest to change you.

Women liked Strike—she had come to realize that over the months they had worked together. She had not understood the appeal when she had started working for him. He was so very different from Matthew.

She was the unique woman in his life who'd never tried to change him.

Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas. Lucky is he who has been able to understand the causes of things Virgil, Georgics, Book 2

A lot of men find it hard to hear how well their other halves get on with other men.