Quotes About Understanding

You have to tell her that you have forgiven what she did to you. You have that duty because we all of us have it. It comes in different forms, but it is always the same duty. We have to forgive.

And the difference was this, she mused: those who are twenty don't know what it is like to be forty, whereas those who are forty know what it is like to be twenty. It was a bit like discussing a foreign country with somebody who has never been there. They are prepared to listen, but it's not quite real for them.

People don't talk about mercy very much these days—it has a rather old-fashioned ring to it. but it exists and its power is quite extraordinary

Words were the very first bandage for any wound.

We are all human, she would say. Men particularly. You must not be ashamed.

If you knew what is was like to be another person, then how could you possibly do something which would cause pain? The problem, though, was that there seemed to be people in whom that imaginative part was just missing. It could be that they were born that way--with something missing from their brains--or it could be that they became like that because they were never taught by their parents to sympathise with others.

How often have I noticed or, indeed, listened to him? We talk, but do I actually listen, or is our conversation mainly a question of my waiting for him to stop and for it to be my turn to say something? For how many of us is that what conversation means - the setting up of our lines?

How can you have a peaceful country where one half of the population thinks that the other is wrong, or hostile, or determined to do them down? What better recipe for unhappiness was there than that?

Everybody who consulted her was, in their way, hurting--even this rich man with his big Mercedes-Benz and his expensive cuff-links. Human hurt was like lightning; it did not choose its targets, but struck, with rough equality and little regard to position, achievement, or moral desert.

But we cannot always choose whose lives will become entangled with our own; these things happen to us, come to us uninvited, and Mma Ramotswe understood that well.

When somebody does wrong, Emma, we must remember that that person is still a human being like the rest of us. We must not rush to throw the first stone. We must remind ourselves that all of us do wrong from time to time, unless we're saints, which we aren't.

Words that are full of hurt sometimes need to be left in the air where they have been spoken.

When we dismiss or deny the hopes of others, she thought, we forget that they, like us, have only one chance in this life.

This had happened because she had been able to make that sudden imaginative leap that lies at the heart of our moral lives: the ability to see, even for a brief moment, the world as it is seen by the other person. It is this understanding that lies behind all kindness to others, all attempts to ameliorate the situation of those who suffer, all those acts of charity by which we make our lives something more than the pursuit of the goals of the unruly ego.

It was not edifying to dwell on the failings of others.

bureaucracy was very rarely an obstruction, provided that one applied to it the insights of ordinary, everyday psychology

There is no need to be unkind to people who are unhappy inside themselves. There is room for everyone. Everyone should be able to find somewhere on this earth to sit down.

Charlie had indeed done something stupid. But this realisation only made her want to defend him. Of course young men did stupid things—it was part of being a young man

we must love those with whom we live and work, and love them for all their failings, manifest and manifold though they be.

Her tone was breezy. That, she thought, was the best way to talk to teenagers—about anything. You talked to them in that way, as if you were not expecting them to be listening to you—which, of course, they were not.

were prepared to shake their heads when they looked at other, unacceptable, people. It was hard work, shaking your head like that, but it had to be done—there was no way round it.

every wife [..] had a mental list of things that her husband should do but realistically never would do.

we live out our years as best we can, not knowing their number, not really knowing, in the case of most of us, why we do what we do and how we came to be where we are; thinking we know it, but suspecting that we do not really know.

It would have been better to talk,' muttered Mma Makutsi. Mma Ramotswe agreed. It was always – always – better to talk.