Quotes About Understanding

you could help people most by not giving them the burden of your heart.

There's one problem with California." I wasn't eager to listen, but the sentence had a promising beginning. "It has no understanding of evil.

S?seki is an unusually intimate writer— the public world is only his concern by implication— and in Japan (again as in the England that I know) intimacy is shown not by all that you can say to someone else, but by all that you don't need to say.

Words have little value in the kingdom of essential things. They're just decorations on the feelings too deep for us to put into syllables.

More important than learning to speak Japanese when you come to Japan is learning to speak silence. My neighbors seem most at home with nonverbal cues, with pauses and the exchange of formulae. What is the virtue of speaking Japanese, Lafcadio Hearn noted, if you cannot think in Japanese?

The symbols mean everything if you accept the feelings that they carry.

C'è una voracità, che hai con le persone che ti vivono intorno, che mi spaventa. E questo tanto più perché io so quanto, dentro di te, ci sia solamente un fondo di sincera bontà

Abbiamo bisogno di tempo. Di mettere tempo fra noi. Di vivere insieme, di viaggiare insieme, perché il nostro pensiero riconosca istintivamente l'altro; e lo riconosca come una presenza automatica di consuetudine e di affetto. Abbiamo bisogno di molto tempo per accettare la brutalità del fatto di non essere più soli.

E lui sa che per gli uomini la cosa più difficile è proprio stabilire un contatto con il mondo degli altri.

task not unlike coming to grips with the Holy Ghost.' There

After meeting you I felt relieved": Who wouldn't want to hear this kind of comment? When we receive it, it's because we have been harmless, and our innate capacity to comfort other people, maybe heal their wounds, found no obstacle on its way. Every human being potentially has this capacity. Just our presence, if we do not judge, if we do not give advice and do not invade, can in all likelihood be beneficial for anyone who is suffering.

Criticism demands infinitely more culture than artistic creation.

The paradox of reading is that the path toward ourselves passes through books, but that this must remain a passage. It is a traversal of books that a good reader engages in - a reader who knows that every book is the bearer of part of himself and can give him access to it, if only he has the wisdom to not end his journey there.

There is more than one way not to read, the most radical of which is not to open a book at all. For any given reader, however dedicated he might be, such total abstention necessarily holds true for virtually everything that has been published, and thus in fact this constitutes our primary way of relating to books. We must not forget that even a prodigious reader never has access to more than an infinitesimal fraction of the books that exist.

It is only by maintaining a reasonable distance from the book that we may be able to appreciate its true meaning.

It is thus tolerance that is the source of peace, and intolerance that is the source of disorder and squabbling.

There is not less wit nor less invention in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book, than in being the first author of that thought.

The more I see of the country, the less I feel I know about it. There is a saying that after five years in the north every man is an expert; after ten years, a novice.

Speaking, when you have something to say, is like looking. But who looks? If people could see properly, and see whole, they would all be painters. And it's because people have no idea how to look that they hardly ever understand.

O pedante compreende sem sentimento profundo, enquanto o mundano usufrui sem compreender.

Si consideramos la hipótesis de que la gente no es leída, se entienden muchas cosas que no se han comprendido durante mucho tiempo pensando que ha sido leída.

mieux la retrouver au terme du travail de reconstruction de l'espace dans lequel l'auteur se trouve englobé et « compris comme un point ».

I would simply ask why so many critics, so many writers, so many philosophers take such satisfaction in professing that the experience of a work of art is ineffable, that it escapes by definition all rational understanding; why are they so eager to concede without a struggle the defeat of knowledge; and where does their irrepressible need to belittle rational understanding come from, this rage to affirm the irreducibility of the work of art, or, to use a more suitable word, its transcendence.

The most excellent and divine counsel, the best and most profitable advertisement of all others, but the least practiced, is to study and learn how to know ourselves. This is the foundation of wisdom and the highway to whatever is good.