Quotes About Understanding

made each other alert to the world's surprises, pleasant, foolish, and tragic.

Do not judge others by their dramatic moments—how they may panic or become nasty or wild in a crisis—in contrast to their much different normal behavior.

But communication is two-sided - vital and profound communication makes demands also on those who are to receive it... demands in the sense of concentration, of genuine effort to receive what is being communicated.

Words do not reflect the world, not because there is no world, but because words are not mirrors.

Not all is doom and gloom. We are beginning to understand the natural world and are gaining a reverence for life - all life.

Wir waren jene, die wussten, aber nicht verstanden, voller Informationen, aber ohne Erkenntnis, randvoll mit Wissen, aber mager an Erfahrung. So gingen wir, von uns selbst nicht aufgehalten.

No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.

To paraphrase Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, and all those guys, "I wish I had known this some time ago.

Si percibimos cosas cuadradas es porque juzgamos que sus figuras corresponden a esta «forma» de la que tenemos conocimiento (en griego antiguo, «forma» se dice eidos, palabra de la que deriva nuestro vocablo «idea»).

Distance was a dangerous thing, she knew. Distance changed people.

The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.

How starved they seemed for ordinary kindness

To let go is not to be protective. It's to permit another to face reality.

Literature is the question minus the answer.

A work has two levels of meaning: literal and concealed.

To try to write love is to confront the muck of language; that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive (by the limitless expansion of the ego, by emotive submersion) and impoverished (by the codes on which love diminishes and levels it).

to me, enlightenment is a big shift inside your eyes, a different way to use your mind so you can understand some of God, some of Jesus. But it is maybe not one shift, but many small shifts. You change your spiritual condition - by prayer, by meditation, by the way you live, the way you decide to think, by the lessons you learn in living this life with a good intention - and then, when this happens, after a long times or a short times, the way you see the world changes.

perhaps all the trouble in the world has, at its root, our insistence on denying others their full humanity.

I am not one of these people who wants everyone to live the way I live. What causes more trouble on our troubled earth than people like that?

There are some kinds of sorrow that words can never reach, certain kinds of things you can never hold in the box of your thoughts, certain kinds of pain you can't soften in other people.

We make up stories about the other person. In our minds we build these stories--she is this way, he is that way; look, she always do this, he always do that--and then these things keep us from seeing this person full as they are in the present moment.

The realm of human understanding is the only realm most of us have access to," I said.

Anger is like hands over your eyes when another person is trying to show you.

I decided that if I was worth anything as a person, I ought to be able to let her be with what it was she had to be with then: not urge her to fight it if she was tired of fighting, not ply her with hope, not make her think about who might be upset or worried, not ask anything of her, nothing, just be alive with her while she was still alive.