Quotes About Understanding

I learned something which has stood me in good stead many times—the most important thing in any relationship is not what you get but what you give.

You must try to understand truthfully what makes you do things or feel things. Until you have been able to face the truth about yourself you cannot be really sympathetic or understanding in regard to what happens to other people. But it takes courage to face yourself and to acknowledge what motivates you in the things you do.

There is another ingredient of the maturing process that is almost as painful as accepting your own limitations and the knowledge of what you are unable to give. That is learning to accept what other people are unable to give you. You must learn not to demand the impossible or to be upset when you do not get it.

If people only realized what a war goes on in a child's mind and heart in a situation of this kind, I think they would try to explain more than they do

If you care enough about certain things and work for them, I think you are bound to find them in the people you are with.

Unless indoctrinated, a child is too logical to understand discrimination.

In this world, no one is all knowing, and therefore, all of us need both love and charity.

To be mature you have to realize what you value most. Not to arrive at a clear understanding of one's own values is a tragic waste. You have missed the whole point of what life is for.

To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart.

A mature person is one who does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally, who has learned that there is both good and bad in all people and in all things, and who walks humbly and deals charitably with the circumstances of life, knowing that in this world no one is all knowing and therefore all of us need both love and charity.

Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living; the other helps you make a life.

We were twelve years old, but we walked along the hot streets of the neighborhood, amid the dust and flies that the occasional old trucks stirred up as they passed, like two old ladies taking the measure of lives of disappointment, clinging tightly to each other. No one understood us, only we two—I thought—understood one another.

Lila shook her head skeptically. She was trying to understand, we were both trying to understand, and understanding was something that we loved to do.

Everything is interesting if you know how to work on it.

We don't know anything about people, even those with whom we share everything.

it was good just to see each other every so often to hear the mad sound of the brain of one echo in the mad sound of the brain of the other.

Finally he had decided that he had to free Lila, even if at that moment, perhaps, she had no desire to be freed. But—he had said to himself—it takes time for people to understand what's good and what's bad, and helping them means doing for them what in a particular moment of their life they aren't capable of doing.

in his view love ended only when it was possible to return to oneself without fear or disgust

As usual it seemed to her that she could enter and leave my life without any worries, as if we were still a single thing and there was no need to ask how are you, how are things, am I disturbing you.

One night my mother said to me: "Your father is younger than you. You're growing up and he's still a child. He'll remain a child forever, an extraordinarily intelligent child hypnotized by his games. If you don't keep an eye on him, he gets hurt. I should have understood him as a girl, but then he seemed to me a grown man.

Translation is our salvation: it draws us out of the well in which, entirely by chance, we are born.

Why, sooner or later, did I always find plausible excuses for those who made me suffer?

Forse dovresti imparare a capire chi sono gli amici e chi i nemici.

He didn't want her the way he generally wanted women, to feel them under him, to turn them over, turn them again, open them up, break them, step on them, and crush them. He didn't want her in order to have sex and then forget her. He wanted the subtlety of her mind with all its ideas. He wanted her imagination. And he wanted her without ruining her, to make her last.