Quotes About Understanding

In fact, because the unself-aware—which includes basically everybody—are impervious to uncharitable perceptions of their underlying motives, all these insights you have into people and what makes them tick are surprisingly useless.

She loved him, but that wasn't good enough. The word "love" was required to cover such a range of emotions that it almost meant nothing at all. Since the love we distill for each beloved conforms to such a specific, rarefied recipe, with varying soupcons of resentment, pity, or lust, and sometimes even pinches of dislike, you really needed as many different words for the feeling as there were people whom you cared for in your life.

So much lying in marriage is merely a matter of keeping quiet.

I can only assume that he discovered what I never wish to. That there is no barrier.

To the degree that Lawrence's face was familiar, it was killingly so - as if she had been gradually getting to know him for over nine years and then, bang, he was known.

Y cómo se supone que uno puede ser «comprensivo» antes de comprender?

Maybe the greatest favor a spouse can tender is to overlook what you can't.

Por qué haces todo lo posible para que tus hijas se sientan unas tontas? —¡No es eso! Sólo intento que se sientan incultas, que no es lo mismo.

Reading is an act of possession. You read it, you own it.

One of the things I learned with Charles," said Gray carefully, "was that finding someone like you does not necessarily mean that either of you should be that way.

maybe it's inevitable that the very things that first attract you to someone are the same things with which you later grow irritated.

Me, I think you only get at gist by assembling all the tiny inconclusive anecdotes that would fall flat at a dinner table and that seem irrelevant until you collect them in a pile.

I've found that people's generalizations are largely illuminating about themselves.

It was peculiar how the more you got to know someone, the more you grew to appreciate how little you knew, how little you had ever known- as if progressive intimacy didn't involve becoming more perceptive, but growing only more perfectly ignorant.

Slapping his shoulder was probably a mistake; he flinched. And for the briefest of moments I appreciated what little access we ever had to what really went on in Kevin's head, since for a second the mask fell, and his face curdled with - well, with revulsion, I'm afraid. To allow even so brief a glimpse of its workings, he must have had other things on his mind.

Nothing is interesting of you're not interested. In vain, I had been waiting for Kevin to price out, to demonstrate as I stood arms folded that he was worthy of my ardor. That was too much to demand of a little boy, who would only be as lovable to me as I allowed him to be. It was past time that I at least met Kevin halfway.

Literature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.

Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.

Since my moral system rests on my accepted version of the facts, he who denies my moral judgments or my version of the facts, is to me perverse, alien, dangerous. How shall I account for him? The opponent has always to be explained, and the last explanation that we ever look for is that he sees a different set of facts. Such an explanation we avoid, because it saps the very foundation of our own assurance that we have seen life steadily and seen it whole.

In places where men are used to differences they inevitably become tolerant.

As I say the words, I realize how true they are. And maybe that's the trick to getting through it, through life: realizing that everybody, including ourselves, is lugging around some kind of screwed-up baggage. Maybe we are put here to help each other carry the loads.

I do not understand it, this fighting and killing/ and urge to conquer." His gaze turned downward then. I touched his arm, and he glanced at me, all the sorrow on this earth filling his eyes then. "I will never understand it.

Keep listening. With open ears, you will be one of the few who learn.

Ketika kau mencintai seseorang, secara otomatis kau menerima segala sesuatu tentang dirinya. Hal-hal yang menjadikan dirinya apa adanya, itulah yang mebuatmu mencintainya. (David Koster - Haunted (Teratu))