Quotes About Understanding

Truth does not become more or less true, whether those who know it are many or few.

I was brought up in southern Massachusetts, where it was thought that mythology was a subject that we should all grasp. It was very much a part of my education. The easiest way to parse the world is through mythology.

We can cherish nothing less than our random understanding of death and the earth-shaking love that draws us to one another ... Cleanliness and valor will be our watchwords. Nothing less will get us past the armed sentry and over the mountainous border.

the Mackenzies regarded all this foolishness with the deepest respect, as if it had some genuine significance. They may have suffered from an indiscriminate sense of the past or from an inability to understand that the past plays no part in our happiness.

A NEW CONQUEST always had a wonderful effect on Charlie. He became overnight generous, understanding, inexhaustibly good-humored, relaxed, kind to cats, dogs, and strangers, expansive, and compassionate.

One of our professors described a lecture as 'a mystical process by which the notes on the pad of the lecturer pass on to the pad of the student, without passing through the mind of either'.

I realised that I really disliked him, and I knew exactly why: he didn't know the difference between being solemn and being serious.

You do realize as you grow older that almost nobody knows what they are talking about.

The neurologist and psychologist Maurice Nicoll told how he had once asked his headmaster about a passage in the Bible, and after he had listened to the answer for some time, he realized that the man had no idea what he was talking about. What I admire about Nicoll is that he made this discovery when he was only ten. It took me another forty-five years before the penny dropped: very, very few people have any idea what they are talking about.

toffs could get up to speed. But Ben at least knew roughly

Frames of Mind

What is not perceived as such is not perceived at all.

And yet he did genuinely love Cordelia. Not with any kind of physical love. That was impossible. But with a feeling of pity that shook the foundations of his nature.

It's as if we were both digging into each other's soul to find a self that was put there before we were born.

I don't understand half of what I read,' Christie began, speaking with extreme precision. 'All I know is that every one of those old books has its own atmosphere for me.

The language of trees is even more remote from human intelligence than the language of beasts or of birds. What to these lovers, for instance, would the singular syllables wuther-quotle-glug have signified?

Every human creature is a terror to every other human creature. Human minds are like unknown planets, encountering and colliding.

In life if you can't have the mind to tolerates others you will find life so difficult to survive.

If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.

I want someone that understands me and all of my complexity.

No one will ever understand the beautiful complexity of my mind.

You will feel pain, You will lose, You will make mistakes But don't worry someday, somehow it will make sense.

I have found in life, that the ones hardest to love are really the ones needing the most.

Sometimes, no matter how much you love someone, they just don't have the capacity to love you back.