Quotes About Understanding

In every prayer the triune God takes a part—the Father who hears, the Son in whose name we pray, and the Spirit who prays for us and in us. How important it is that we are in right relationship to the Holy Spirit and that we understand His work!

To know how to speak to God is more than knowing how to speak to man. Not

to the child, the Father all for the child. We shall understand how Father and child, the Thine and the Our, are all one, and how the heart that begins its prayer with the God-devoted Thine, will have the power in faith to speak out the Our too. Such prayer will, indeed, be the

needs to learn that God intends that

As a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth you.

cannot love him." Oh, friend, you have not learned the lesson that Christ wanted to teach above everything. Let a man be what he will, you

Books—all books—are complicated things, muttering at us in different contradictory voices, refusing to stay the same when we go back to them. Tying them down too much robs of them of the magic.

How remarkable we are in our ability to hide things from ourselves - our conscious minds only a small portion of our actual minds, jellyfish floating on a vast dark sea of knowing and deciding.

What is love, Arthur? What is it?" she asks him. "Is it the good dear thing I had with Janet for eight years? Is it the good dear thing? Or is it the lightning bolt? The destructive madness that hit my girl?

Because to love someone ridiculous is to understand something deep and true about the world. That up close it makes no sense. Those of you who choose sensible people may feel secure, but I think you water your wine; the wonder of life is in its small absurdities, so easily overlooked. And if you have not shared somebody's tilted view of the horizon (which is the actual world), tell me: what have you really seen?

We think we know people, and dismiss the scenes as aberrations, as the lightning strikes of madness, but surely we are wrong. Surely these are the truest moments of their lives.

Strange to be almost fifty, no? I feel like I just understood how to be young.

We think we know the ones we love, and though we should not be surprised to find that we don't, it is heartbreak nonetheless. It is the hardest kind of knowledge, not just about another but about ourselves. To see our lives as a fiction we have written and believed. Silence and lies. The sensation I felt that evening--that I did not know my Holland, did not know myself, that it was perhaps impossible to know a single soul on earth--it was a fearful loneliness.

Despite all their fears, we ask very little of the ones who never loved us. We do not ask for sympathy or pain or compassion. We simply want to know why.

Around the world his pity flies, its wingspan as wide as an albatross's.

If only he could learn to lie so compassionately.

We kept each other's stare a long time, for we had each done a startling thing, dodged time for an instant - which is the only definition of happiness I know.

We are deaf to what life brings us.

Because to love someone ridiculous is to understand something deep and true about the world. That up close it makes no sense.

What I wanted to say was: I understand that it wasn't that you didn't want to be with me anymore, but you didn't want to be yourself anymore, the one you were with me.

Strange to be almost 50, no? I feel like I just understood how to be young.

Strange to be almost 50, no? I feel like I just understood how to be young." "Yes. It's like the last day in a foreign country. You finally figure out where to get coffee and drinks and a good steak and then you have to leave. And you won't ever be back.

Hard to feel bad for a middle-aged white man.

I feel like I just understood how to be young." "Yes! It's like the last day in a foreign country. You finally figure out where to get coffee, and drinks, and a good steak. And then you have to leave. And you won't ever be back.