Quotes About Understanding

They don't know about art. Maybe I don't know about art myself. Maybe none of our family does, not the way that you do. But that's my point. People don't read art—they read about people.

Qué profundo es el oído! Piensa en lo que significa comprender algo que solamente has oído. ¡El carácter casi divino del oído! ¿No es por lo menos un fenómeno semidivino verte ante las inequidades más profundas de una existencia humana por el sencillo procedimiento de permanecer sentado en la oscuridad, escuchando lo que te dicen?

The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that—well, lucky you.

víctima, y a las víctimas trato de comprender.

The important thing was to forget about Iris's hair and let her speak, let her find her fluency and, from the soft streaming of her own words, create for him his apologia.

If there was ever anything to know, now he knew he never had known it.

Some things just have to be believed to be seen.

Misunderstanding must be nakedly exposed before true understanding can begin to flourish.

The first step in helping a suffering person is to acknowledge that the pain is valid, and worthy of a sympathetic response.

Sometimes the only meaning we can offer a suffering person is the assurance that their suffering, which has no apparent meaning for them, has a meaning for us.

The main purpose of prayer is not to make life easier, nor to gain magical powers, but to know God.

The Quakers have a saying: "An enemy is one whose story we have not heard." To communicate to post-Christians, I must first listen to their stories for clues to how they view the world and how they view people like me. Those conversations are what led to the title of this book. Although God's grace is as amazing as ever, in my divided country it seems in vanishing supply.

Faith, I've concluded, means believing in advance what will only make sense in reverse.

La fe consiste en creer por anticipado algo que solo tendrá sentido cuando se mire hacia el pasado.

Prayer is the act of seeing reality from God's point of view.

We do not pray to tell God what he does not know, nor to remind him of things he has forgotten. He already cares for the things we pray about... He has simply been waiting for us to care about them with him.

What is faith, after all, but believing in advance what will only make sense in reverse

He learned, like every good novelist, that human behaviour can neither be explained nor predicted, only rendered.

How differently will I relate to the uncommitted if I view them not as evil or unsaved but rather as lost.

In sum, I would far rather convey grace than explain it.

I've yet to meet someone who found their way to faith by being criticized.

As a Christian, my main concern is not to downgrade others' beliefs but to examine my own.

I do not get to know God, then do God's will; I get to know God by doing that will.

Let me see them as thirsty people, I pray, and teach me how best to present the Living Water.