Quotes About Understanding

It comes to us all. The moment when you realise that nothing but love will do.

I sometimes think we should go back to the old days, when there was proper courtship, when people walked out together for weeks and weeks before anything happened. At least then you know something about each other, you have some solid ground to put your feet on. We're all so impatient now, we just want to get to the main action.

I hate the way, once you start to know someone, care about them, their behavior can distress you, even when it's unreasonable and not your fault, even if you were really trying to be careful, tactful.

course, he didn't actually want her to go, nor did she care to join him. The tension in her shoulders eased a little, realizing he wanted her to say no. Pretending to contemplate his invitation, Zoe relaxed

yes was bound to start a fight. After all these years, Zoe realized it was all in how things

All I did was listen, Annie. When the Universe talks, I pay attention." He bent his head close to hers and said quietly, "Funny thing is … the closer you listen, the more it seems to say.

The more you know, the less you understand.

It sometimes seemed to him that for love to work, it had to be fair, that he should tell only half the joke, and she the other half. Otherwise, it would not be love, but something completely else–pity or entertainment, or stand-up comedy.

Paul thought of how they'd kept delaying buying plane tickets to visit his parents in Taiwan - in December, which was next month, he knew - as if in tacit understanding that their relationship wouldn't last that long. Paul felt himself trying to interpret the situation, as if there was a problem to be solved, but there didn't seem to be anything, or maybe there was, but he was three or four skill sets away from comprehension, like an amoeba trying to create a personal webpage using CSS.

It sometime occurred to him that for love to work, it had to be fair, that he should tell only half the joke, and she the other half. Otherwise, it would not be love, but something completely else--pity or entertainment, or stand-up comedy.

You always think the best of me,' I said, squeezing water from my hair. 'Even when you shouldn't.' 'That's what love is,' he said, and he got up and walked inside.

Emotional fixations are like that—if you see them clearly, unflinchingly, for what they really are, you take the power away from them. They no longer control you. Confusion dawns as clarity.

We let the schema define our experience.

compassion is a great tranquilizer.

In the Dalai Lama's words, "One of the deepest human desires is to be known and understood.

That schema builds up the perception of danger by exaggerating any hint of a threat, so that small squalls become major hurricanes in the mind. The island woman had the opposite understanding: real danger may come, so you do everything you can to prepare, but once you've done what you can, just relax.

Mindfulness means seeing things as they are, without trying to change them. The point is to dissolve our reactions to disturbing emotions, being careful not to reject the emotion itself. Mindfulness can change how we relate to, and perceive, our emotional states; it doesn't necessarily eliminate them.

Understanding, too, can be a form of forgiveness.

means to penetrate dense emotions. This meditative awareness, I've found, can bring us a remarkably subtle understanding of our emotional patterns and so help us find ways to unravel deep fixations and destructive habits.

This meditative awareness, I've found, can bring us a remarkably subtle understanding of our emotional patterns and so help us find ways to unravel deep fixations and destructive habits.

A Buddhist principle holds that awareness leads to empathy.

The poet Longfellow writes, "If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.

We can't understand the nature of reality until we let go of controlling our experience.

Once someone is an unreal other, we lose sight of how they hurt. Because we don't experience them as feeling beings, we not only ignore them, we can inflict pain on them without compunction. Not