Quotes About Understanding

There were times, she thought, when 'ah' said everything that needed to be said

Never try to reach a conclusion before you reach the conclusion.

You can't condemn the present for the wrongs of the past.

It is always the same, Mma Makutsi—every time. Exactly the same. So now I know what that guy says without needing to read his book." This was heresy, and for a few moments Mma Makutsi was almost too shocked to respond.

we don't see our parents as people. Your daddy was also a man—a very good man too—but he was a man.

In the lives of most of us, the list of unsaid things was, he thought, a long one.

Reflections on human smallness have often prompted me to think that. What do divisions between people matter? What does it matter if somebody is English or Scottish or whatever?

I am blessed, and being blessed is something more than just having something; it is a state of mind in which the good of the world is illuminated, is understood. It is as if one is vouchsafed a vision of some sort, she thought, a vision of love, of agape, of the essential value of each and every living thing.

But then men do not see things the same way we do, she thought. They have different eyes.

A woman sees more than a man sees. That is well-known.

YOU DO NOT CHANGE PEOPLE BY SHOUTING AT THEM

There are plenty of good stories. There are plenty of good people who go through life without … well, without anger. Who are kind to other folk. Who don't rant and rage.

wrong to think the less of another for what he or she was. There was no moral obligation to like others, nor necessarily to enthuse over them, but we did have to recognize their equal worth.

If your friend smells of fish you should not try to let it affect your friendship. Everybody, thought Ranald Braveheart Macpherson, knows that.

Every story has two sides. So far, we've only heard one. The stupid side."   LIFE

Mma Ramotswe had been understanding. Men who sired children and then failed to accept responsibility for them were anathema to her, and she reserved particular disapproval for those who then completely disappeared. She

He was one of those people, she thought, who just seemed to know a great deal. And he spoke so wisely, as if had thought for hours about everything he said.

Nihil humanum mihi alienum est

Love and compassion are the only balm

acknowledge the unexpected exchange of fellow feeling between

It defeated him that anybody could ever bring such a result about if they knew, or could imagine, the heartbreak of the victim's family. Of course the people who did these things were usually deficient in moral imagination—they could not see what it would be like because they simply lacked the capacity to do so.

We all have Proustian moments, but don't really know about it until we read Proust.

you did not look for a winner who would take everything; you found a way of allowing people to save face; you found a way of healing rather than imposing.

You might disagree with others for what they said or for what they did—that was one thing—but to take against them simply for what they were was to blame them for something over which they had no control, and was cruel, and profoundly wrong.