Quotes About Understanding

If you wish to know the mind of a man, listen to his words." — JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

I am willing to release that part of me that irritates me when I think of you.

Behind every highly dramatic person lurks an unresolved trauma. Drama is his or her way of asking for love, and begging for help and understanding.

She could be affectionate, generous, and optimistic one day; vengeful, depressed, and irritable the next. In the colloquial language of her friends, she was "either in the garret or cellar." In either mood, she needed attention, something the self-contained Lincoln was not always able to provide.

It seemed as though Theodore's passion for Alice far exceeded his genuine knowledge of her.

If the spirited crowd expected a speech exalting recent Union victories, they were disappointed. In keeping with his lifelong tendency to consider all sides of a troubled situation, Lincoln urged a more sympathetic understanding of the nation's alienated citizens in the South.

Get the books, and read and study them," he told a law student seeking advice in 1855. It did not matter, he continued, whether the reading be done in a small town or a large city, by oneself or in the company of others. "The books, and your capacity for understanding them, are just the same in all places. . . . Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing.

If Roosevelt were given another chance to lead the country, he intended to make the Republican Party once more the progressive party of Abraham Lincoln, to restore "the fellow feeling, mutual respect, the sense of common duties and common interests which arise when men take the trouble to understand one another, and to associate for a common object.

As S. S. McClure well understood, the "vitality of democracy" depends on "popular knowledge of complex questions." At

When you have worked with them, when you have lived with them, you do not have to wonder how they feel, because you feel it yourself.

Though Lincoln did not drink, smoke tobacco, use profane language, or engage in games of chance, he never condescended to those who did. On the contrary, when he had addressed the Springfield Temperance Society at the height of the temperance crusade, he had insisted that "such of us as have never fallen victims, have been spared more from the absence of appetite, than from any mental or moral superiority over those who have.

When I read aloud," Lincoln later explained, "two senses catch the idea: first, I see what I read; second, I hear it, and therefore I remember it better.

The books, and your capacity for understanding them, are just the same in all places…. Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing.

As ever, books remained a medium through which Theodore and Edith connected and interpreted larger world.

The more you read about a subject, he advised me, the more interesting it will seem.

With kindness, playfulness, wit, and wisdom, he would explain "things hard for us to understand by stories—maxims—tales and figures. He would almost always point his lesson or idea by some story that was plain and near as that we might instantly see the force & bearing of what he said." He understood early on that concrete examples and stories provided the best vehicles for teaching.

Understand the emotional needs of each member of the team.

since I heard. Yes, Will, I do know her, and it makes

Lincoln's abhorrence of hurting another was born of more than simple compassion. He possessed extraordinary empathy—the gift or curse of putting himself in the place of another, to experience what they were feeling, to understand their motives and desires.

Leaders in every field, Roosevelt later wrote, "need more than anything else to know human nature, to know the needs of the human soul; and they will find this nature and these needs set forth as nowhere else by the great imaginative writers, whether of prose or of poetry.

The incident suggests Roosevelt's developing sense of empathy. While Lincoln's seems to have been his by right of birth, Roosevelt slowly expanded his understanding of other people's points of view by going to places that a man of his background typically neither visited nor comprehended.

The generation gap is just another way of saying that the younger generation makes overt what is covert in the older generation; the child expresses openly what the parent represses."36 There was in the

talk about their work, their families, their lives. He had always loved to talk, but now he learned to listen, and to listen intently, his head nodding in a welcoming way, with an air of sympathetic identification, an attentive posture and manner that would become a lifelong characteristic.

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don't read a book out of its right time for you.