Quotes About Understanding

blurring the lines between us and them can be a worthy behavior. After

One must listen to them carefully to understand that while pain is universal, it is also utterly private. We

For we are the ones most able to know ourselves and yet the most unable to know ourselves. It's as if our noses are pressed up against the pages of a book, the words right in front of us but which we cannot read. Just as distance is needed for legibility, so it is that if we could only split ourselves in two and gain some distance from ourselves, we could see ourselves better than anyone else can.

Ignorance is beneficial when we are aware of it.

In the end, my father had it right. He called me nothing at all.

One must listen to them carefully to understand that while pain is universal, it is also utterly private. We cannot know whether our pain is like anybody else's pain until we talk about it. Once we do that, we speak and think in ways cultural and individual.

Perhaps forgiveness is overrated,

I cannot be the only one who believes that if others just saw who I really was, then I would be understood and, perhaps, loved.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That sounds good, but things are never that simple. The problem, you see, is how to know what we want to have done to us.

blurring the lines between us and them can be a worthy behavior.

Here's to you, Claude, I said, raising my glass to him. Congratulations. For what? he said, raising his own. Now you know what it feels like to be one of us. His laugh was short and bitter. I was thinking the exact same thing.

But what is more revolutionary than helping one's enemy and his kin? What is more radical than forgiveness?

Racist love is still racist.

I am simply able to see any issue from both sides. Sometimes I flatter myself that this is a talent, and although it is admittedly one of a minor nature, it is perhaps also the sole talent I possess.

Don't you get it? They've got no intention of coming back. They know it's a suicide mission. Life's a suicide mission.

We don't succeed or fail because of fortune or luck. We succeed because we understand the way the world works and what we have to do. We fail because others understand this better than we do. They take advantage of things...and they don't question things. As long as those things work for them, then they support those things. But you see the lie beneath those things because you never got to take part.

the General, like myself, knew he must be patient with white people, who were easily scared by the nonwhite. Even with liberal white people, one could go only so far, and with average white people one could barely go anywhere.

It was, instead, the best kind of truth, the one that meant at least two things.

Aren't you afraid of ghosts?" I asked. Over the line, in the silence, the static hissed. "You aren't afraid of the things you believe in," he said. This, too, I wrote in his memoir, even though I had not understood what he meant.

Be kind. It's worthwhile to make an effort to learn about other people and figure out what you might have in common with them.

Can you join, ask sincerely for affection without sweaty hand of expectation, understanding and accepting if it never is given?

Never judge a man's actions until you know his motives

I may have entered her body, but now I want to enter her mind.

Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.