Quotes About Understanding

Doesn't part of the awe that fills us when we confront the unknown come from understanding that, should it at last flood into us and become known, we would be altered?

At the moment the postman rang the bell, Litvinoff's pen has been poised above a blank piece of paper, his eyes watery with revelation, filled with the feeling that he was on the verge o understanding the essence of something. But when the bell rang the thought was lost, and Litvinoff, ordinary again, dragged his feet down the dark hallway and opened the door where the mailman stood in the sunlight.

These mistakes were heart-breaking. And yet, because people knew how easily they could happen , because they didn't go around with the illusion that they understood perfectly the things other people said., they were used to interrupting each other to ask if they'd understood correctly. Sometimes these misunderstandings were even desirable, since they gave people a reason to say, Forgive me, I was only scratching my nose. Of course I know I have always been right to love you.

Later - when things happened that they could never have imagined - she wrote him a letter that said: When will you learn that there isn't a word for everything?

Quand apprendras-tu qu'il n'existe pas un mot pour chaque chose ?

He wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard […]. How could he have forgotten what he had always known: there is no match for the silence of God.

How you fall in love and it's there that the work begins: day after day, year after year, you must dig yourself up, exhume the contents of your mind and soul for the other to sift through so that you might be known to him, and you, too, must spend days and years wading through all that he excavates for you alone, the archaeology of his being, how exhausting it became, the digging up and the wading through, while my own work, my true work, lay waiting for me.

Cand te tii cu cineva de mana, de pilda, e un mod de a-ti aduce aminte cum e cand nu spuneti nimic impreuna. Si noaptea, cand e prea intuneric ca sa mai vedem ceva, simtim nevoia sa gesticulam cu ajutorul trupului celuilalt, pentru a ne face intelesi.

No es que hayamos olvidado por completo el lenguaje de los gestos (…) cuando está oscuro y no podemos ver, sentimos la necesidad de tocar el cuerpo del otro para hacernos entender".

And yet, because people knew how easily they could happen, because they didn't go around with the illusion that they understood perfectly the things other people said, they were used to interrupting each other to ask if they had understood correctly.

Knowledge doth come of learning well retained, Unfruitful else

That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.

How can those who live in the light of the day possibly comprehend the depths of the night?

As soon as you feel yourself against me you have ceased to understand my position and consequently my arguments! You have to be the victim of the same passion!

What is love but understanding and rejoicing that another lives, works, and feels in a different and opposite way to ourselves? That love may be able to bridge over the contrasts by joys, we must not remove or deny those contrasts.

One knows a little too much about everybody. And we can even see through some men, and yet we can by no means pass through them.

Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as they are not.

As long as you still experience the stars as something above you, you lack the eye of knowledge.

Enjoyment belongs to those who know things halfway.

If you only know your own side of a case, then your belief is likely to be inadequate. You need to be able to refute counter-arguments to your position otherwise you aren't justified in your belief even if it happens to be true.

wisdom and understanding in the course of human history will only come fully at a late stage, when we're looking back on what has already happened, like someone looking back on the events of a day as night falls.

Black Poetry is not for Black People…it is for everybody

It is called education because it is learned. You do not have to have had an experience in order to sympathize or empathize with the subject. That is why books are written: so that we do not have to do the same things. We learn from experience, true; but we also learn from empathy." A Theory of Patience

If you don't understand your past, you can't transcend it, you might repeat it, you don't understand half of your life. Knowledge is what's important, you know? Not the erasure, but the confrontation of it.