Quotes About Understanding

A man fell in love with Jeanne, and she tried to love him. But she complained that he uttered such ordinary words, that he could never say the magic phrase which would open her being.

Truth is something which can't be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.

I love your silences, they are like mine.

I despise my own hypersensitiveness, which requires so much reassurance. It is certainly abnormal to crave so much to be loved and understood.

You live out the confusions until they become clear.

I must know, he thinks. It must be clear to me. There is a world which is closed to him, a world of shadings, gradations, nuances, and subtleties. He is a genius and yet he is too explicit. June slips between his fingers. You cannot posses without loving.

Instead of answering her as soon as he saw her hair grow electric, her face more vivid, her eyes like lightning, her body restless and jerky like a racehorse's, he retired behind this wall of objective understanding, this gentle testing and acceptance of her, just as one watches an animal in the zoo and smiles at his antics, but is not drawn into this mood. It was this which left Lilith in a state of isolation - indeed, like a wild animal in an absolute desert.

It is easy to love and there are so many ways to do it.

I can only connect deeply or not at all.

I would not be concerned with the secrets, the lies, the mysteries, the facts. I would be concerned with what makes them necessary. What fear.

Through books I discovered everything to be loved, explored, visited, communed with. I was enriched and given all the blueprints to a marvelous life, I was consoled in adversity, I was prepared for both joys and sorrows, I acquired one of the most precious sources of strength of all: an understanding of human beings, insight into their motivations.

Our talks are wonderful, interplays, not duels but swift illuminations of one another. I can make his tentative thoughts click. He enlarges mine. I fire him. He makes me flow. There is always movement between us. And he is grasping. He takes hold of me like a prey.

I always run away from the simplest phrases because they never contain all of the truth. To me the truth is something which cannot be told in a few words, and those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.

Every lover could be brought to trial as the murderer of his own love. When something hurts you, saddens you, I rush to avoid it, to alter it, to feel as you do, but you turn away with a gesture of impatience and say: I don't understand

They had reached a perfect moment of human love. They had created a moment of perfect understanding and accord. This highest moment would now remain as point of comparison to torment them later on when all natural imperfections would disintegrate it.

I weep because you cannot save people. You can only love them. You can't transform them, you can only console them.

Lillian was reminded of the Talmudic words: We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.

I love you, June, and you know how acutely, how desperately. You know that no one can say or do anything to shake my love. I have taken you into myself, whole. You need have no fear of being unmasked, only loved.

Didn't the old man know how words carry colors and sounds into the flesh

We can build a palace around us if everything is right between us.

As soon as I kiss him I know that I love him with a blind instinct beyond all reason, with all his defects.

I felt him in everything. And what I felt was too deep.

A man who dominates is a man who does not love. He has a tremendous animal vitality, a force, which conquers. He conquers, people are subjected by him, but he neither loves nor understands

Will I really be able to accept my mental loneliness?