Quotes About Understanding

To let every impression and the germ of every feeling come to completion inside, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, in what is unattainable to one's own intellect, and to wait with deep humility and patience for the hour when a new clarity is delivered: that alone is to live as an artist, in the understanding and in one's creative work.

Learning-time is always a long, secluded time..

Please don't think that the person trying to comfort you is living untroubled among these simple, quiet words that sometimes do you good. His own life has plenty of trouble and sadness; it lags far behind his words. And yet, were that not true, he would never have been able to find them.

Each person loses himself then for the other's sake and loses the other and many more who were yet to come.

And perhaps the sexes are more related than we think, and the great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this, that man and maid, freed of all false feelings and reluctances, will seek each other not as opposites, but as brother and sister, as neighbours, and will come together as human beings, in order simply, seriously and patiently to bear in common the difficult sex that has been laid upon them.

Works of art can be described as having an essence of eternal solitude and an understanding is attainable least of all by critique. Only love can grasp and hold them and can judge them fairly.

Do not think that the person who is trying to console you lives effortlessly among the simple, quiet words that sometimes make you feel better. His life is full of troubles and sadness and falls far short of them. But if it were any different he could never have found the words that he did.

Do not strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given you because you have not been able to live them.

Viva por algum tempo nesses livros, aprenda com eles o que lhe parecer digno de aprendizado, mas sobretudo os ame.

Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.

Wir haben, wo wir uns lieben, ja nur dies: einander lassen; denn daß wir uns halten, das fällt uns leicht und ist nicht erst zu erlernen.

for at bottom, and just in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone, and for one person to be able to advise or even help another, a lot must happen, a lot must go well, a whole constellation of things must come right in order once to succeed.

await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist's life: in understanding as in creating.

So much has been written (both well and poorly) about things that the things themselves no longer hold an opinion but appear only to mark the imaginary point of intersection for certain clever theories. Whoever wants to say anything about them speaks in reality only about the views of his predecessors and lapses into a semipolemical spirit that stands in exact opposition to the naïve productive spirit with which each object wants to be grasped and understood.

because I consider this to be the highest task of a connection between two people: that both guard the others loneliness. – Rainer Maria Rilke

The wish to improve another person's situation presupposes a level of insight into his conditions that even a poet does not possess with regard to a character he himself invented.

And if what is close is far, then the space around you is wide indeed and already among the stars; take pleasure in your growth, in which no one can accompany you, and be kind-hearted towards those you leave behind, and be assured and gentle with them and do not plague them with your doubts or frighten them with your confidence or your joyfulness, which they cannot understand.

Live the questions now. Perhaps you then may gradually, without noticing, one day in the future, live into the answers.

How we waste our afflictions! We study them, stare out beyond them into bleak continuance, hoping to glimpse some end. Whereas they're really our wintering foliage, our dark greens of meaning, one of the seasons of the clandestine year -- ; not only a season --: they're site, settlement, shelter, soil, abode.

Be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue. Do not now strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given you because you have not been able to live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now.

At bottom, and just in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone, and for one person to be able to advise or even help another, a lot must happen, a lot must go well, a whole constellation of things must come right in order once to succeed.

When we meet others, we should not think of ourselves as superior and look down on them or pity them, but see them as the source of our happiness.

I firmly believe that if science proves scriptures wrong, then the scriptures should be changed. The Buddha himself says that understanding must come through investigation logic and reasoning. Not just faith.

Baba Farid seems to have said to his disciples, 'Give me not a knife but a needle. I want to sew together, not cut asunder.