Quotes About Understanding

People who are harder to love pose a challenge, and the challenge makes them easier to love. You're driven to love them. People who want their love easy don't really want love.

I can only know myself, if I can know anyone. I can only judge me.

It makes you feel good about yourself, especially in the beginning. It makes you feel good about other people. You want to give the whole world a break, a time-out, a tender regard. There

Reading him was like reading runes — apparently you had to know the language.

Everyone's got their own way of loving. There's no such thing as 'supposed to

Don't judge the past by the standards of today. It won't work. They're incompatible.

Facts bring us to knowledge, but stories lead to wisdom.

Of course love is never earned. It is a grace we give one another. Anything we need to earn is only approval.

Sometimes just being in someone's presence is strong medicine.

Before every session, I take a moment to remember my humanity. There is no experience that this man has that I cannot share with him, no fear that I cannot understand, no suffering that I cannot care about, because I too am human. No matter how deep his wound, he does not need to be ashamed in front of me. I too am vulnerable. And because of this, I am enough.

I suspect that the most basic and powerful way to connect with another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention. And especially if it's from the heart. When people are talking, there's no need to do anything but receive them. Just take them in. Listen to what they're saying. Care about it. Most times caring about it is even more important than understanding it.

I am no longer as inspired by expertise as I once was. Perhaps the worth of any lifetime is measured more in kindness than in competency.

We are all here for a single purpose: to grow in wisdom and to learn to love better.

An animal that doesn't talk -- what a concept," Adriane remarked.

What did I do, Win? You just left. You were supposed to come to my house. If it was too much, too soon, you should have told me. I'd never pressure you to do anything you didn't want to do. That's it, right? That has to be it.

There were two kinds of students who liked the library: those who devoured one book after another and those who savored the same book repeatedly. Now she understood those rereaders differently ... she realized it was not the rereading that led to fresh insights. It was the rereader-- because when a person is changing inside, there are inevitably new things to see.

Silence made space for other people's words, which was important for those who needed to be listened to.

So you never know when you can get through. p 179 Jack the Bus Driver talking about helping a woman on the bus who was an alcoholic

I realize, as the tightness yields in my shoulders and hips and feet, that Beth might well have wanted me to meet her drivers because I needed them, too." p 167

Privilege is like oxygen. You don't realize it's there until it's gone.

A void in my chest was beginning to fill with anger. Quiet, defeated anger that guaranteed me the right to my hurt, that believed no one could possibly understand that hurt.

In Scripture, obedience is heavily relational. It's about allegiance and learning to share God's mind. Even the word for obedience comes from a root that indicates "to hear." Only someone who is in relationship with God and is listening to him can obey.

But the thing that's wrong with Danny is more like, he wants friends but doesn't know how to navigate that, and he doesn't handle his own feelings particularly well, and so everybody finds him annoying.

If answers are the destination, questions are the oars.