Quotes About Understanding

You don't know what you don't know. That's why you don't have. Because to know and not to have is not to know.

What others may perceive as a gamble, leaders understand to be merely a calculated risk. In the face of superior odds, a leader must have the courage to innovate.

To be in love was to understand how alone one had been before. It was to know that if one were ever alone again, there would be no exemption from the agony of it. It wasn't the happiest feeling.

Still shaking, in the pew, I understood that it isn't the dead we cry for. We cry for ourselves, and I didn't deserve my own pity.

Stupid is you can't learn, ignorant is you haven't learned yet.

Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.

Peace is a time when people can tell each other their real names

They spoke of small things at first, since it was best, when reattaching threads, to begin with the easiest knots.

If you cannot read the beautiful things that have happened in someone's life, why should you care about their sadness?

Perhaps this was what love was like after all- not the lurch of going over a humpback bridge, and not the incandescence of fireworks, just the quiet understanding that one should take a kind hand when it was offered, before all light was gone from the sky.

Lawrence frowned. "I don't get you," he said. "If you understood how serious your situation is, I don't think you'd smile." I shrugged. "If I could not smile, I think my situation would be even more serious.

Don't you think we shall all be kinder to one another? I hope one's class will matter less and one's convictions more. I hope we might be more inclined to pardon one another for our errors with both.

This was always my trouble when I was learning to speak your language. Every word can defend itself. Just when you go to grab it, it can split into two separate meanings so the understanding closes on empty air. I admire you people. You are like sorcerers and you have made your language as safe as your money.

occurred to him that no one who hadn't been in battle could know what things were worth.

To be in love was to understand how alone one had been before.

Let them say whatever gives them comfort.

It was how mothers carried on, after all, with a glint in the eye that implied a sure clairvoyance and also that it was your turn to talk. This was the velvet rope mothers offered: enough silence to make a noose with. Mary

Do you know what peace is, Charlie?... Peace is a time when people can tell each other their real names.

You are not bad people. You are blind to the present and we are blind to the future.

This is the real reason why no one tells us Africans anything. It is not because anyone wants to keep my continent in ignorance. It is because nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles. Or maybe you would like to, but you can't. Your culture has become sophisticated, like a computer, or a drug that you take for a headache. You can use it, but you cannot explain how it works.

I realized I knew nothing about men apart from the fear.

You have to see everyone in relationship to you. Just because you understand the shit in someone else's life doesn't mean you don't stand up for your own.

No amount of effort could have stopped that, because our points of view - the way we perceive things - are inextricably linked to our beliefs, ... ,our beliefs color what we see.

Then hearing Elvis today made me think I didn't have a lot to bitch about, but when I said that to Mr. Nak after group, he said, "Don't get to thinkin' just because some other guy's sinkin' in horse manure, the stuff up around your neck is chocolate puddin'. A wound is a wound, young Brewster. Remember that. Don't diminish the pain of your own just because you see some other gut-shot cowboy bleedin' to death.