Quotes About Understanding

All this means in fact that one believes oneself to have such sureness of intelligence that acknowledging an inability to understand calls in question the clarity of the author and not that of one's own mind.

I am caught in this contradiction: on the one hand, I believe I know the other better than anyone and triumphantly assert my knowledge to the other ( I know you—I'm the only one who really knows you!); and on the other hand, I am often struck by the obvious fact that the other is impenetrable, intractable, not to be found; I cannot open up the other, trace back the other's origins, solve the riddle. Where does the other come from? Who is the other? I wear myself out, I shall never know.

But if one fears or despises so much the philosophical foundations of a book, and if one demands so insistently the right to understand nothing about them and to say nothing on the subject, why become a critic?

The dream: to know a foreign language yet not to understand it: to perceive the difference in it without that difference ever being recuperated by the superficial sociality of discourse, communication or vulgarity... to undo our own "reality" under the effect of other formulations, other syntaxes... in a word, to descend into the untranslatable.

Love's atopia, characteristic which causes it to escape all dissertations, would be that *ultimately* it is possible to talk about love only *according to a strict allocutive determination*; whether philosophical, gnomic, lyric, or novelistic, there is always, in the discourse upon love, a person whom one addresses, though this person may have shifted to the condition of a phantom or a creature still to come. No one wants to speak of love unless it is *for* someone.).

Roland Barthes

Amour au bandeau: Ce proverbe est faux. L'amour ouvre grand les yeux, il rend clairvoyant:J'ai, de toi, sur toi, le savoir absolu. Rapport du clerc au maître; tu a tout pouvoir sur moi, mais j'ai tout savoir sur toi.

Roland Barthes

è sterile ricondurre l'opera a qualcosa di puramente esplicito, perché allora non c'è, immediatamente, più nulla da dirne e perché la funzione dell'opera non può consistere nel chiudere le labbra di coloro che la leggono

Roland Barthes

Amour au bandeau: Ce proverbe est faux. L'amour ouvre grand les yeux, il rend clairvoyant:J'ai, de toi, sur toi, le savoir absolu. Rapport du clerc au maître; tu as tout pouvoir sur moi, mais j'ai tout savoir sur toi.

The value of your travels does not hinge on how many stamps you have in your passport when you get home -- and the slow nuanced experience of a single country is always better than the hurried, superficial experience of forty countries.

The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee," he once said, "and I pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun.

Burr is said to have remarked, "Had I read Sterne more and Voltaire less, I should have known the world was wide enough for Hamilton and me.

Henceforth he would project himself into opponents' minds and comprehend their fears and anxieties instead of blowing them up into all-powerful bugaboos, giving him courage when others quailed.

Like most people, Hamilton and Adams were preternaturally sensitive to flaws in the other that they themselves possessed.

because we don't have to talk. Often we sit fifteen minutes in silence before one of us breaks it!

giving him more generous sympathy than he received in return

which he attributed to his discomfort with Jews.

he listened closely to what people said and filed away as much information as he could, repeating valuable information to himself until it was memorized.

I bore it in silence. It does no good to dispute with such a man.

He stared into his eyes

his great confidence and trust in me bridged all the difference in age, wealth, and position.

She confided in John, felt a peaceful glow in his presence, and he responded with deep compassion.