Quotes About Understanding

Don't struggle too hard to understand people, Sym. They're hideously complicated. Unhappy people do the oddest, most terrible things, just trying to keep despair at bay. All you have to do is accept them...go around them...take evasive action.

You aren't stupid, Lillian,' said Uncle Victor, smiling and shaking his head, 'but sometimes the things you do are.

When Titus speaks, I can hear every word. For me, that's like when the optician slides home the right lens and all the e's and g's and o's and c's become perfectly clear again and it isn't a struggle, even to read the bottom-most line...His voice touches places inside me like someone moving through a house, flicking light switches...No peering into corners for what's been said.

For throughout history, the synthesizing impulse has proved a powerful even world-changing, tool for understanding the universe, capable of penetrating the intricate,contradictory web of surface phenomena to reveal the universal,unified cosmos beneath--that fundamental,unchanging phenomenon we call truth.

Zullen we even medelijden met onszelf hebben?' vroeg hij?

U bent toch Gerard Reve, die het altijd over één ding tegelijk heeft, en pas als hij dat afgehandeld heeft verder gaat met iets anders? U bent toch een gewone katholieke volksjongen en geen volksverlakker? Nu, het doet mij echt goed dat van U te horen, waaruit blijkt dat U mijn werk begrijpt en waardeert.

Wie weet, wordt mijn Ziel steeds gezonder, of misschien ook niet - ik heb van die dingen erg weinig verstand - maar in ieder geval trekt hij zich tegenwoordig van heel wat zaken geen bal meer aan.

Remember the first time you went to a show and saw your favorite band. You wore their shirt, and sang every word. You didn't know anything about scene politics, haircuts, or what was cool. All you knew was that this music made you feel different from anyone you shared a locker with. Someone finally understood you. This is what music is about.

Everybody gets depressed; it's totally normal.

As long as one sex held power over the other, they would never be able to find out what differences there really were between the sexes -- psychically - if there were any at all.

An intuition is neither caprice nor a sixth sense but a form of unconscious intelligence.

Knowledge is the antidote to fear.

Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.

Einstein's rule is a general way to realize that less can be more in an uncertain world.

Always ask: What is the absolute risk increase?

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's mind without another's guidance. Dare to know! Freedom

The quest for certainty is the biggest obstacle to becoming risk savvy. While there are things we can know, we must also be able to recognize when we cannot know something.

The Silent majority is silent, and that is best for everybody.

The state of admiration is a condition of feeblemindedness. Most people are feebleminded all their lives only because they admire. Only a dimwit admires, the smart one doesn't admire: he respects, observes, understands.

The older I grow, the more I listen to people who don't talk much.

To understand everything makes one tolerant.

Her love for him not militate against her love for other people, did not force itself upon him when he did not invite it, did not belittle or destroy him, even by mendacious praise. When he was dying she was there to help him. This strange distant love-affair is only one example of how many forms love might take if we had the foresight and the imagination to rescue it from the stereotypes of our dying consumer culture.

Half the point in reading novels and seeing plays and films is to exercise the faculty of sympathy with our own kind, so often obliterated in the multifarious controls and compulsions of actual social existence.

Charity sees the need not the cause.