Quotes About Understanding

Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.

To see around corners is enough (that is not unusual when you are invisible). But to hear around them is too much; it inhibits action.

Literature is integrated, and I'm not just talking about color or race. I'm talking about the power of literature to make us recognize - and again and again - the wholeness of the human experience.

Power, for the writer….lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.

No indeed, the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.

Shouldn't the short man have the right to make a mistake without his motives being considered consciously or unconsciously malicious?

Well, you had better speak more slowly so we can understand. We mean to do right by you, but you've got to know your place at all times. All right, now, go on with your speech.

Responsibility rests upon recognition, and recognition is a form of agreement.

Education Is All A Matter Of Building Bridges

Besides, I might as well admit right now, I thought, that there are many things about people like Mary that I dislike. For one thing, they seldom know where their personalities end and yours begins; they usually think in terms of we while I have always tended to think in terms of me--and that has caused some friction, even with my own family.

Still it was nothing new, white folks seemed always to expect you to know those things which they'd done everything they could think of to prevent you from knowing.

Why do you laugh?" he said. "Because at a price I now see that which I couldn't see," I said.

Being invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what else could I do? What else but try to tell you what was really happening when your eyes were looking through? And it is this which frightens me: Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?

Don't laugh at fools. Some are His.

Maybe it's just that some of us have had certain facts and truths slapped up against our heads so hard and so often that we have to see them and pay our respects to their reality.

Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.

Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Fear always springs from ignorance.

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.

The years teach much the days never know.

The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained and he only holds the key to his own secret.

We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation -rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.

The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil.