Quotes About Understanding

She realized for the first time that two people can never reach each others deepest feelings and instincts, that they spend their lives side by side, linked it may be, but not mingled, and that each one's inmost being must go through life eternally alone.

And I certainly wouldn't demonize an entire people on the basis of 3 blurry photos and a few paintings

Pour que vous parveniez à bien nous comprendre, il vous faudrait vivre longtemps , entourées de Noirs, en Afrique, et loin des Blancs dont la civilisation trop poussée finit par tout détruire !

the names we use for things bear no inherent relation to the things themselves.

Noam Chomsky has famously argued that a Martian scientist would conclude that all earthlings speak dialects of the same language.

So if you, O subsequent ones, ever deign to look down at us from your summit of effortless superiority, remember that you have only scaled it on the back of our efforts. For it is thankless to grope in the dark and tempting to rest until the light of understanding shines upon us. But if we are led into this temptation, your kingdom will never come.

Much of a language's complexity is not necessarily for effective communication.

The new anthropology required each culture to be understood on its own terms, as a product of its own evolution rather than as merely an earlier stage in the ascent toward Western civilization.

Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.

But, in reality, the ingenious inferences made in these experiments are symptoms not of great strength but of great weakness. For all this ingenuity is needed only because we know so little about how the brain works. Were we not profoundly ignorant, we would not need to rely on roundabout methods of gleaning information from measures such as reaction speed to various contrived tasks.

My stay-married secret would probably be exercising good communication, not when you have to but all the time. I think if you do that, you kinda just cleanse the situations, so there's not build up. I think that's probably the best way to do it.

Being anxious, or in a painful rush of any kind, kills the possibility of meeting anyone with compassion.

Freedom is not found in escaping "this" or possessing "that" . . . Real freedom is the active understanding that the world of "this and that" is a window into a higher order of reality not limited by the opposites.

You don't need strength to let go of something. What you really need is understanding.

Fearlessness comes with the birth of this new understanding: The only reason life changes as it does is to reveal the secret Goodness underlying those same changes.

Men have need of history because, without it, the past threatens to overwhelm them.

Language. The process of sharing with words seemed such a futile exercise sometimes.

He wanted to achieve something of surpassing beauty that would last. A creation that would mean that he--the mosaic worker Caius Crispus of Varena--had been born, and lived a life, and had come to understand a portion of the nature of the world, of what ran through and beneath the deeds of women and men in their souls and in the beauty and the pain of their short living beneath the sun.

His intelligence stretched her to the limits, and then changed what those limits were.

We live among mysteries. Love is one, there are others. We must not imagine we understand all there is to know about the world.

Devin wondered how often men did what they did, made the choices of their lives, for reasons that were clean and uncomplicated and easily understood as they were happening

I think,' said Ammar ibn Khairan of Aljais, very slowly, 'that I should know you in a pitch black room. I think I would know you anywhere near me in the world.' He paused. 'Is that answer enough, Jehane? Or too much of one? Will you say?

He didn't think he would understand the strangeness of life if he lived to be a hundred years old.

He had a sense, through that spring, that his life would be so much better for her presence. He wasn't wrong, but it was equally a truth that the purpose and direction of her life was not to make his better, and in time he even came to understand that.