Quotes About Understanding

That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts

He who speaks a bit of a foreign language has more delight in it than he who speaks it well; pleasure goes along with superficial knowledge.

Those who hear not the music think the dancers mad.

Good writers have two things in common: they prefer to be understood rather than admired; and they do not write for knowing and over-acute readers.

Women are considered deep - why? Because one can never discover any bottom to them. Women are not even shallow.

Ultimately no one can hear in things?books included?more than he already knows. If you have no access to something from experience, you will have no ear for it.

Whoever knows he is deep, strives for clarity; whoever would like to appear deep to the crowd, strives for obscurity. For the crowd considers anything deep if only it cannot see to the bottom: the crowd is so timid and afraid of going into the water.

Go up close to your friend but do not go over to him! We should respect the enemy that is in our friend

No one can draw more out of things, books included, than he already knows. A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access.

Fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons.

Sometimes it is harder to accede to a thing than it is to see its truth.

What else is love but understanding and rejoicing in the fact that another person lives acts and experiences otherwise than we do?

Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not even superficial.

You shall love beyond yourselves some day! So first, learn to love. And for that you have to drink the bitter cup of your love.

Loneliness is one thing, solitude another: you have learned that - now!

we often refuse to accept an idea merely because the way in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us.

He who knows the reader, does nothing for the reader.

Light for some time to come will have to be called darkness.

Slow is the experience of all deep fountains: long have they to wait until they know what has fallen into their depths.

Twofold misjudgement. - The misfortune suffered by clear-minded and easily understood writers is that they are taken for shallow and thus little effort is expended on reading them: and the good fortune that attends the obscure is that the reader toils at them and ascribes to them the pleasure he has in fact gained from his own zeal.

A friend should be a master at guessing and keeping still: you must not want to see everything.

All concepts in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated elude definition; only that which has no history is definable.

Rather know nothing than half-know many things! Rather be a fool on one's own account than a wise man in the opinion of others!

There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective knowing; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our concept of this thing, our objectivity, be.