Quotes About Understanding

That the other suffers has to be learned; and it can never be learned fully.

The sage as astronomer.—As long as you still feel the stars as something 'above you', you have not yet acquired the gaze of a man of deep understanding.

Somebody said: About two persons I have never reflected very thoroughly: that is the testimony of my love for them.

Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood, and thou wilt find that blood is spirit. It is no easy task to understand unfamiliar blood; I hate the reading idlers. He who knoweth the reader, doeth nothing more for the reader. Another century of readers—and spirit itself will stink.

I want, once and for all, not to know many things. Wisdom requires moderation in knowledge as in other things.

It is difficult and painful for the ear to listen to anything new; we hear strange music badly.

Must one first batter their ears, that they may learn to hear with their eyes? Must one clatter like kettledrums and penitential preachers? Or do they only believe the stammerer?

Something might be true, even if it is also harmful and dangerous in the highest degree; indeed, it might be part of the essential nature of existence that to understand it completely would lead to our own destruction.

If you still experience the stars as something over you, you still don't have the eyes of a knower.

Is language the adequate expression of all realities?

Whoever knows he is deep tries to be clear, but whoever wants to seem deep to the crowd tries to be obscure. For the crowd supposes that anything it cannot see to the bottom must be deep: it is so timid and goes so unwillingly into the water.

We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers, and with good reason. We have never looked at ourselves.

Not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, does the enlightened man dislike to wade into its waters

A good book is made better by good readers and clearer by good opponents.

Men after death are understood worse than men of the moment, but heard better.

There are many more languages than one imagines. And man reveals himself much more often than he wishes. So many things that speak! But there are always so few listeners, so that man, so to speak, only chatters in a void when he engages in confessions. He wastes his truths just as the sun wastes its light. Isn't it too bad that the void has no ears?

One always has exaggerated ideas about what one doesn't know.

Who suffers more? After a personal disagreement and quarrel between a woman and a man, the one party suffers most at the thought of having hurt the other; while that other party suffers most at the thought of not having hurt the first enough; for which reason it tries by tears, sobs, and contorted features, to weigh down the other person's heart, even afterwards

What is familiar is what we are used to; and what we are used to is most difficult to 'Know' - that is, to see as a problem; that is, to see as strange, as distant, as 'outside us'.

The discerning one walketh amongst men as amongst animals.

Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity.

That the other suffers must be learned; and it can never be learned completely.

The more thoroughly a person understands life, the less he will mock, though in the end he might still mock the thoroughness of his understanding.

Sometimes, you have to love beyond yourself! And that's how you learn to love! That's why you had to drink the bitter glass of your love.