Quotes About Understanding

The truth is that a lot of these men don't know how to relate to lovers, so they only view women as sisters or mothers. It truly grieves me! I feel so bad for all these daughters who are awakened for love, but are living among boy/men who are asleep to manhood.

Hate the sin but not the sinner.

There is humanity even in the most wicked.

Men are amazing. I love the way they are. They're consistently little boys, and they need to be nurtured and loved. But at the same time, they need to feel like men.

You can disagree with another person's opinions. You can disagree with their doctrines. You can't disagree with their experience.

I can disagree with your opinion, it turns out, but I can't disagree with your experience. And once I have a sense of your experience, you and I are in relationship, acknowledging the complexity in each other's position, listening less guardedly. The difference in our opinions will probably remain intact, but it no longer defines what is possible between us.

For every shrill and violent voice that throws itself in front of microphones and cameras in the name of God, there are countless lives of gentleness and good works who will not. We need to see and hear them, as well, to understand the whole story of religion in our world.

Truth can be told in an instant, forgiveness can be offered spontaneously, but reconciliation is the work of lifetimes and generations.

I come to understand that for most of my life, when I was looking for love, I was looking to be loved. In this, I am a prism of my world. I am a novice at love in all its fullness, a beginner.

We have to be educated by the other. My heart cannot be educated by myself. It can only come out of a relationship with others. And if we accept being educated by others, to let them explain to us what happens to them, and to let yourself be immersed in their world so that they can get into our world, then you begin to share something very deep. You will never be the person in front of you, but you will have created what we call communion.

Listening is about being present, not just about being quiet.

Generous listening is powered by curiosity, a virtue we can invite and nurture in ourselves to render it instinctive. It involves a kind of vulnerability—a willingness to be surprised, to let go of assumptions and take in ambiguity. The listener wants to understand the humanity behind the words of the other, and patiently summons one's own best self and one's own best words and questions.

We chose too small a word in the decade of my birth—tolerance—to make the world we want to live in now. We opened to the racial difference that had been there all along, separate but equal, and to a new infusion of religions, ethnicities, and values. But tolerance doesn't welcome. It allows, endures, indulges. In the medical lexicon, it is about the limits of thriving in an unfavorable environment.

Listening is about being present, not just about being quiet. I meet others with the life I've lived, not just with my questions.

And it is in the whole educational system, that we must educate people to become capable and to take their place in society. That has value, obviously. But it's not quite the same thing as to educate people to relate, to listen, to help people to become themselves.

Sometimes one wise voice that has been in the world for a while and evolved, lived the same human drama from a few different angles, can provide more nuance than any two-sided debate.

Wonderment in the face of the other is also so beautifully exacting a progression from mere tolerance.

sometimes our hearts just need time to accept what are heads already know

It doesn't matter how old you are, what level of schooling you've had or where you live—stalking is innate to the female psyche. We've all been there.

Maybe love isn't just a bouquet of roses once in a whole. Maybe it's just sticking it out, when it's hard, when you're mad, when you're tired.

But they're family, and you forgive them, even if they are human equivalent of hyenas. Because that's what you do, Posey. Forgive.

God must've had single women in mind when he invented dogs

He knows. I can see it in his eyes, he feels how much I love him still, and maybe he's always known.

For twelve years, I've been trying to make him just one of the guys. He's not.