Quotes About Understanding

Don't persuade, defend or interrupt. Be curious, be conversational, be real. And listen.

Rumi says: Out beyond ideas of wrong doing and right doing There is a field. I'll meet you there.

Don't keep searching for the truth; Just let go of your opinions.

Only people who claim their own voice can hear the true song of another.

Everything gets sorted out in the Great Silence.

T. S. Eliot says, "The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing," he writes, "there is a field. I'll meet you there.

To trust who our child is, and not who we think he should be or what the world wants him to be—that perhaps is the single greatest gift a parent can give.

If I can approach change with an understanding of the process and an openness to the pain, then my daily labors will be swift and fruitful.

How can it be when we're all safeguarding the very same story? That's why Rumi calls it an Open Secret.

where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves.

I'm not perfect. Remember that, and try to forgive me when I fail you.

Most people don´t like to think, period.

I studied because I wanted to know, not because I wanted the world to know I knew.

In a whole world of strangers, she´s the only one alive who shares the first half of my life, of my memories, of myself. There are times I want to strangle her, a lot more time I want to scream at her to grow up, but I love her anyway.

The woman had been seen now a half-dozen times and had become a mass of characteristic motions and friendly staring eyes. Ellen longed to fix her into a thought, to know what she would say now that she knew how she would look saying it. She longed to find her out, to like her or to hate her.

I never thought of it like that. I always thought of you as a part of me, like my own eyes or my own hands. You don't go around thinking 'I love my eyes, I love my hands', do you? But think what it would be like to live without your eyes or your hands. To be mad, or to be blind. I can't talk about it. It's how I feel.

I'm not saying they're gods or anything of the kind. It's that we don't know how their minds work. We can't judge them by ourselves.

I saw that animals were important. I saw that plants were even more important. I was also to learn that compared to many of the other species, we weren't important at all except for the damage we do. We do not rule the natural world, despite our conspicuous position in it. On the contrary, it is our lifeline, and we do well to try to understand its rules.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

I told him that I apologised, that I understood, but really: I am not a museum, not yet, I'm a love letter, a love letter.

I've always hated the notion, in life or in fiction, that the human personality is a puzzle to be solved, that we are a single flashback away from understanding why this person is cruel to her children, why that man has a dreamy, downcast look. A human being is not a lock and the past is not a key.

When you entered the cavern of another language, you could leave certain people behind, for they had no interest in following you in. You could, by way of translation, emerge from the cavern and share your adventures with them. You didn't have to be an intellectual in a black beret smoking clove cigarettes to be a translator, not at all. You could become one in your blue flannel pajamas, your face smeared with Clearsil. You did.

If you love it enough, anything will talk with you." —G. W. CARVER