Quotes About Understanding

Aren't you ashamed that you pay all of your attention to acquiring as much money as you can, without giving any thought to truth and understanding and the perfection of your soul?

wish that some sorts of love would decide to speak their names a bit less loudly. Did people not realize how tiresome so much of this conversation was to anyone who thought the sexual behaviour of other people was not a matter to discuss or judge?

Decades with Paola had accustomed Brunetti to the extremity of most of her positions; they had also taught him that, on the subject of the Church, she was immediately incandescent and seldom lucid.

A love that dared not speak its name'? In recent years, Brunetti had come to wish that some sorts of love would decide to speak their names a bit less loudly. Did people not realize how tiresome so much of this conversation was to anyone who thought the sexual behaviour of other people was not a matter to discuss or judge?

Detach language from meaning, and the world was yours.

He smiled at the brilliance of his perception, and Brunetti, too, smiled, delighted to hear it.

Intellectuals"?' Brunetti repeated. 'I think it's more true to say they're the cartographers of the Flat Earth Society

It's more important to understand people than to forgive them.

when children loved you, you knew everything, and when they were angry with you, you knew nothing?

veryone is capable of learning; the trick is knowing what you need to learn.

All those layers of silence upon silence.

To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole;

More than anything I was relieved that in my unfamiliar babbling-and-wanting-to-talk state I'd stopped myself from blurting the thing I'd never said, even though it was something we both knew well enough without me saying out loud to him in the street - which was, of course, I love you.

Who cares? If he is good to you? None of us ever find enough kindness in the world, do we?

I was fascinated by strangers, wanted to know what food they ate and what dishes they ate it from, what movies they watched and what music they listened to, wanted to look under their beds and in their secret drawers and night tables and inside the pockets of their coats.

It does not do to be frightened of things about which you know nothing," he said. "You are like children. Afraid of the dark.

It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them...

And I know I said earlier that he was perfect but he wasn't perfect, far from it; he could be silly and vain and remote and often cruel and still we loved him, in spite of, because.

It's not about outward appearances but inward significance. A grandeur in the world, but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn't understand. That first glimpse of pure otherness, in whose presence you bloom out and out and out. A self one does not want. A heart one cannot help.

She looked up at me, her eyes large with compassion, with understanding of the solitude and incivility of grief.

It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own. Even more terrible, as we grow old, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us.

What you want is to live and be happy in the world is a woman (or man) who has her (his) own life and lets you have yours

It does not do to be frightened of things about which you know nothing, he said. You are like children. Afraid of the dark.

I wanted her to know just how much I loved her while also letting her know that she bore not one particle of blame for not loving me back. But I wouldn't say that. It was rosepetals I wanted to throw, not a poison dart.