Quotes About Understanding

Despite no education, Mrs. Finn always is more in charge of word meanings than I am. She is especially in charge of Good and Bad. My language limitations here are real. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life. If I really knew this language, there would surely be in my head, as there is in Webster's or the Dictionary of American Slang, that unreducible verb designed to tell a person like me what to do next.

retrospective smartness

There is a long time in me between knowing and telling.

My language limitations here are real. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life. If I really knew this language, there would surely be in my head, as there is in Webster's or the Dictionary of American Slang, that unreducible verb designed to tell a person like me what to do next.

Remembering is organized for significance (not usefulness)

The truth of God's Word cannot be subject to the puny light of man's self-centred reason

Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Know what I mean?

When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity…. Hate was just a failure of imagination.

No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness.

Hate is a lack of imagination.

Most things disappoint till you look deeper.

Time has its revenges, but revenge seems so often sour. Wouldn't we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife with a husband, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that's why men have invented God – a being capable of understanding.

Perhaps we will not only improve our understanding and analysis but we might also learn better ways to be human, better ways to live in the world. If we do not hope for something like that it seems to me that we ought not to be taking up so much of other people's time with our questions and our stories (G. Harvey 2011b).

The trouble with forgiveness is that some people don't want to be forgiven.

One smile is more effective than a thousand shouts

Straight men just can't imagine the bliss of being in a relationship with someone who finds farting as funny as they do.

I know what you are thinking about', said Tweedledum: 'but it isn't so, nohow.' 'Contrariwise,' continued Tweedledee, 'if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be: but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.

You, man, who read these lines, they are written to you by a brother who has suffered much. My thoughts are wrung from the deepest distress, yet still they try to find expression. O, that you could and would understand me! Some people are capable of deep, heartfelt, self-sacrificing love, yet the only possible object of their love is a person of their own sex. There are said to be such women, and I know that such men exist. I myself am such a man. These confessions contain a life of anguish.

How we forgive narrowness of mind, when it accompanies largeness of heart. Yet no breadth of intellect exonerates want of feeling.

Don't always try to understand everything...some things will just never make sense; when you are happy smile, when you are sad, cry but always tune into that best part of yourself where the music "waits"...it will never disappoint you...only the "savvy strutters" know this to be true.

Try for perfect communication, but give yourself a break if you're not there yet.

English is illogical in places. Trying to make it logical is a mistake. Instead, bend to it.

8I have charity for the Jew (I say Jew, because I mean them from whence I came). 9

In all of these cases, someone can act as a CCO not because he has studied contemporary culture but because he comes from that culture. He knows it in his bones.