Quotes About Understanding

Thought One of the most important ways we can show our respect and love is by listening carefully when another person speaks. When we interrupt, no matter how important our contribution may seem, we're damming up the flow of energy and giving the other person the nonverbal message that their thoughts and feelings are less important than our own.

We have to learn to hear on every level at once if we are really to become whole. The problem is that most of us are deaf in at least one ear. We have to learn to listen to Scripture. And we have to learn to listen to life around us.

I have come to understand that the voice of God is all around me. God is not a silent God. God is speaking to me all the time. In everything. Through everyone. I am only now beginning to listen, let alone to hear.

Humility is reality to the full.

Darkness deserves gratitude. It is the alleluia point at which we learn to understand that all growth does not take place in the sunlight.

I began to trust the questions themselves to lead me beyond answers to understanding, beyond practice to faith

Make your husband talk about his work. Drag it out of him, if you have to. But, you're saying, my husband's a cashier. How can I take an interest in that? Well, for openers, you might say, "Any holdups today?" And go on to find out what keeping books is all about. What an auditor is. Follow changes in tax laws in the daily newspaper. You might even find all this fascinating. He has to.

We all think we have the formula for a good marriage—whether or not we've made it work ourselves—and I'm no exception. My recipe: Be a giver, not a taker.

Humility does not necessarily require me to agree and comply with everyone else's position, but it does demand that I be willing to understand and respect the many sides of every issue.

Knowledge of God and knowlegde of self give birth to humility.

But our society does not grant nontraditional forms of intelligence equal recognition, no matter how much it would help us get along or truly enrich our lives.

Learn to be - gentle with them. Learn that... that gentleness isn't... weakness.

Yes, she made me love her. But she didn't mean to. She took by giving... and that makes all the difference.

I love you,' he whispered again, wonderingly, as he understood at last how a lifetime together with someone that you loved could seem like an eternity, and yet not be long enough.

Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.

In the early years, you fight because you don't understand each other. In later years, you fight because you do.

Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is control.

It is very unfair to judge of anybody's conduct, without an intimate knowledge of their situation. Nobody, who has not been in the interior of a family, can say what the difficulties of any individual of that family may be'" (E 1:18).

By paying attention to another woman (Edward to Lucy and Frederick to Louisa), about whom he doesn't really care, each man hurts the woman he really loves and who really loves him.

Lynn said that therapy was like separating the strands in a tangled web of yarn. It made sense that things would keep getting more separate for awhile so that we eventually came back together in an organized way. (205)

I'm going through hell," I cried, "and Steve wants me to be thankful he baked a pie." (272)

I thought carefully about the events of the evening and decided that there must be limitations on desires. It wasn't true that I could have anything I wanted. I felt good about understanding that, but I still didn't know how people figured out what it was safe to want. I did know, from my mother's scolding, that 'wanting' was a problem. If the desire could not be filled, then I was greedy and selfish. Since I couldn't figure out how to judge the possibility of fulfilling a desire. (66).

I had never before considered that people near me might have problems that were not caused by me. I had been created to please people. If the people around me weren't happy, I must be doing something wrong. Lynn helped me see that I lacked the power to make other people feel anything.

When the Jo personality first told him of the diagnosis, he called MPD "clinical bullshit." Then, seeing Jo's stricken look, he softened and showed her how the possibility of many personalities in a single body was philosophically untenable. MPD did not fit into Steve's system of beliefs, and therefore it did not exist.