Quotes About Understanding

If you want to understand your government, don't begin by reading the Constitution. (It conveys precious little of the flavor of today's statecraft.) Instead, read selected portions of the Washington telephone directory containing listings for all the organizations with titles beginning with the word National.

The columnist gives these words to the longings of an 11-year-old he meets with Tourette's syndrome: "Wisdom is encoded in our common language. We all have, to some extent, a complex, sometimes adversarial, relationship with our physical selves. And I more than most people know that it is correct to say,'I have a body.' There is my body, and then there is ME, trying to make it behave.

I think that knowledge enslaves us, that at the base of all knowledge there is a servility, the acceptation of a way of life wherein each moment has meaning only in relation to another or others that will follow it.

Je n'ai jamais été jeune, parce que personne n'a voulu l'être avec moi.

Cuando a los sabios se les agota la sabiduría, conviene escuchar a los niños.

Even from the Cross, when Our Lord in His agony found the perfection of His Sacred Humanity—even then He did not own Himself a victim of injustice: They know not what they do.

If it was necessary to tolerate in other people everything that one permits oneself, life would be unbearable.

Now Borluut tried to work out how this had happened to him. Passion flows like a river and it is very difficult to go back to its source. It began imperceptibly.

One of them, for example, which will probably haunt me more than any other is the problem of communication.

They never addressed each other by name, nor were they in the habit of exchanging endearments. What was the point, since both felt that, in many ways, they were one person?

Si parte da un dettaglio qualsiasi, talvolta di poco conto, e senza volerlo si giunge a scoprire grandi princìpi.

The inspector knew the mentality of malefactors, criminals and crooks. He knew that you always find some kind of passion at the root of it.

Human tragedies are always simple when we reconsider them in retrospect.

È terribile pensare che siamo tutti uomini, tutti destinati, chi più chi meno, a portare il nostro fardello sotto un cielo sconosciuto, e che non vogliamo fare il minimo sforzo per capirci a vicenda.

Everything always comes down to language in the end.

The tendency toward empathy is strongest between the ages of seven and twelve.

Researchers believe that the conscious cultivation of empathy, including through the reading of novels (see S. Keen), will make communication far easier and will save us from future world cataclysms. —The Journal of Community and Cortex

nothing is accomplished when people face each other shouting words that neither hear.

The unexplainable thing in nature that makes me feel the world is big fat beyond my understanding – to understand maybe by trying to put it into form. To find the feeling of infinity on the horizon line or just over the next hill.

It is only by selection, by elimination, and by emphasis that we get at the real meaning of things.

To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.

To see takes time.

What does it matter who a person is or who they have been? Let them think what they like. We're all so many people, aren't we, nowadays? So confusing it is, I don't know how anyone keeps track. There are the people we are inside, then the people we used to be, then there are the people other people think we are.

In a happy marriage it is the wife who provides the climate, the husband the landscape.