Quotes About Understanding

D]iagnosis needed to rest in order to let research catch up. It made no sense to keep rearranging the furniture of descriptive psychiatry, creating new diagnoses or altering the thresholds of existing ones, based only on the whims of the experts who happened to be in the room. [...] Changes in diagnoses should be few and far between until we gained much deeper understanding of what causes the mental disorders and how best to define and treat them.

We don't have to fully perceive or understand the underlying nature of our world to negotiate it well. Our senses and reasoning powers evolved as they did because they work just fine in the everyday, nonphilosophical business of survival. Mental constructs of reality are imperfect, but indispensable, ways to organize the otherwise bewildering phenomena of the world.

Sanity - a trick of agreement

Many seek and never see, anyone can tell them why. O they weep and O they cry and never take until they try unless they try it in their sleep and never some until they die. I ask many, they ask me. This is a great mystery.

I write poetry because I want to be alone and want to talk to people.

The message is: Widen the area of consciousness.

My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.

A word on Academies; poetry has been attacked by an ignorant & frightened bunch of bores who don't understand how it's made, & the trouble with these creeps is they wouldn't know Poetry if it came up and buggered them in broad daylight.

Realization hit her, but she didn't want to believe. Didn't want to be hurt.

The best musicians answer something in you when you don't even know the question.

So that's Richard, says Sally. So that's Mike, I say. Sally puts an arm around me and squeezes, then leans in close. Thank God for us, that's what I say. Thank God. And I mean it.

Pain is always new to the sufferer, but loses its originality for those around him.

Pain is always new to the sufferer, but loses its originality for those around him. Everyone will get used to it except me.

Your eyes are wide open. I feel as though I could step inside them and make myself at home.

There are some things that a woman knows that she cannot tell even her family. It is part intuition and part self-preservation.

You are too young to understand, solange, but there are many different types of love in this world. There are lovers of the flesh, lovers of the mind, and lovers sustained by family.:

Nos sonreímos el uno al otro, como si ambos supiéramos algo que ninguno de los dos tenía el valor de decir.

Mostly, what people mean by love is laziness.

It's okay," I said, holding her, starting to cry myself. "It's not okay," said Jane. "But it's the way it is.

To a good man, yes, one who knows her in all her moods, who can laugh at her follies and rejoice in her virtues; who will not allow her to give in to her worst instincts; one who knows her, and who, knowing her, will still love her, and love her as she should be loved.

As soon as two or more people are together there is inevitably conflict, even if they like and respect each other. In order to resolve those conflicts there needs to be good will on both sides, and a willingness to give and take.

Nor let us be resentful when others differ from us. For all men have hearts, and each heart has its own leanings. Their right is our wrong, and our right is their wrong.

Resenting the obtuseness of others is not good ground for shooting oneself in the foot.

A historian can never claim to have the last word on anything as he is limited by his sources and further so by his viewpoint.