Quotes About Understanding

Aurelius Alphonse Love.

Our lives are so important to us that we tend to think the story of them begins with our birth. First there was nothing, then I was born…Yet that is not so. Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Families are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole.

By the time we wake up to ourselves, we are little children, and our advent is something that happened an eternity ago, at the beginning of time. We live like latecomers at the theater; we must catch up as best we can, divining the beginning from the shape of later events.

There are times when the human face and body can express the yearning of the heart so accurately that you can, as they say, read them like a book.

But there was more. Did she know I had noticed? I had made no outward sign. But I had noticed. Today Miss Winter had said I.

We were both lone twins.

I'm sorry," I heard her say. "One gets so used to one's own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people.

It was surprising how a man's mind might remain half in shadow until the right confidant appeared

Cualquier institutriz, después de pasar unas pocas horas en esta casa, se habría hecho una idea clara y completa de la tarea a la que se enfrenta; pero el médico es un hombre, de modo que no puede percatarse de lo tedioso que a cualquiera le resulta que le expliquen detenidamente lo que ya ha entendido.

But you know it was here? In this house?" Aurelius shoved his hands into the depths of his pockets. His shoulders tightened. "I wouldn't expect other people to understand. I haven't got any proof. But I do know." He sent me a quick glance, and I encouraged him, with my eyes, to continue. "Sometimes you can know things. Things about yourself. Things from before you can remember. I can't explain it.

He didn't know, of course. Not really. And yet that was what he said and I was soothed to hear it. For I knew what he meant. We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delineaments, the weight and the dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the colour of grief is common to us all. 'I know,' he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.

Though children are capable of great cruelty. Only we do not like to think it of them.

Armstrong] had found the line that separated humans from the animal kingdom to be a porous one, and all the things that people though unique to them--intelligence, kindness, communication--he had seen in his pigs, his horse, even the rooks that hopped ad strutted amongst his cows. And then there was this: the methods he used on animals generally bore fruit when applied to people too. He could usually win them round in the end.

Lo lamento -le oí decir-. Nos acostumbramos tanto a nuestros propios horrores que olvidamos el efecto que pueden tener en otras personas.

Like I've said, prejudice means pre-judging. Making assumptions without taking the time to learn. Ignorance is the cause and ignorance can be overcome with knowledge.

It's complicated' says either I'm too stupid to figure it out, or I'm not in the inner circle for privy information." Not

Never mind your intentions. Communication is about what others hear with your words.

I was learning that just being a Negro doesn't qualify you to understand the race situation any more than being sick makes you an expert on medicine.

I guess that makes me as white as you now, boy. I got your spit inside me.

How can the intensity of this shame be understood by those who have never experienced it? How can they understand the strength of the motivations produced by the desire to escape from it?

This is a book unlike any other on Barack Obama. It is not the typical effusive book of apostolic praise, but neither is it a crude bashing of Obama. Rather, it is an effort to understand Obama, to discover what motivates him, and to formulate a theory that explains his actions in the White House. It offers a completely original theory for what drives Obama, and yet remarkably the theory is derived from Obama's

Resistance to usurpation is possible provided the citizens understand their rights and are disposed to defend them.1 —Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist

Like many other much-loved humans, they believed that they owned their dogs, instead of realizing that their dogs owned them.

Topaz was wonderfully patient - but sometimes I wonder if it is not only patience, but also a faint resemblance to cows.