Quotes About Understanding

We imagine always when we speak that it is our own ears, our own mind, that are listening.

Discovery consists not in seeking new lands, but in seeing with new eyes.

The best vaccine against anger is to watch others in its throes.

When we are in love, our love is too vast to be wholly contained within ourselves; it radiates outwards, reaches the resistant surface of the loved one, which reflects it back to its starting-point; and this return of our own tenderness is what we see as the other's feelings, working their new, enhanced charm on us, because we do not recognize them as having originated in ourselves.

We imagine always when we speak that it is our own ears, our own mind, that are listening. The truth which one puts into one's words does not carve out a direct path for itself, it is not irresistibly self-evident. A considerable time must elapse before a truth of the same order can take shape in them.

That our words are, as a general rule, filled by the people to whom we address them with a meaning which those people desire from their own substance, a meaning widely different from that which we had put into the same words when we uttered them, is a fact which is perpetually demonstrated in daily life.

for each of us sees clarity only in those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own.

As coisas de que falamos o mais das vezes em tom de gracejo são geralmente, ao contrário, as que incomodam, mas não queremos mostrá-lo, com talvez a esperança inconfessada de uma vantagem suplementar: de justamente a pessoa com quem conversamos, ouvindo-nos gracejar daquilo, pensar que não é verdade.

it would even be inexact to say that I thought of those who read it as readers of my book. Because they were not, as I saw it, my readers. More exactly they were readers of themselves, my book being a sort of magnifying glass … by which I could give them the means to read within themselves.

Quantas pessoas, cidades, caminhos, não nos torna assim o ciúme ávidos de conhecer? Ele é uma sede de saber graças à qual, sobre pontos isolados uns dos outros, acabamos tendo sucessivamente todas as noções possíveis, exceto as que desejaríamos.

Of these multiple impressions our memory is not capable of furnishing us with an immediate picture. But that picture gradually takes shape, and, with regard to works which we have heard more than once, we are like the schoolboy who has read several times over before going to sleep a lesson which he supposed himself not to know, and finds that he can repeat it by heart next morning.

Creer que una persona participa de una vida incógnita, cuyas puertas nos abriría su cariño, es todo lo que exige el amor para brotar, lo que más estima, y aquello por lo que cede todo lo demás.

How much farther does anguish penetrate in psychology than psychology itself!

For in order to really suffer at the hands of a woman one must have believed in her completely.

Ogni lettore, quando legge, legge sé stesso. L'opera dello scrittore è soltanto una specie di strumento ottico che è offerto al lettore per permettergli di discernere quello che, senza libro, non avrebbe forse visto in sé stesso.

You may not have heard, Duke, that there is a new word to describe that sort of attitude," said the archivist, who was Secretary to the Committee against Reconsideration, "One says 'mentality.' It means exactly the same thing, but it has the advantage that nobody knows what you're talking about. It's the ne plus ultra just now, the 'latest thing,' as they say.

Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.

A real person, profoundly as we may sympathize with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, remains opaque, presents a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift. If some misfortune comes to him, it is only in one small section of the complete idea we have of him that we are capable of feeling any emotion; indeed it is only in one small section of the complete idea he has of himself that he is capable of feeling any emotion either.

In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self.

The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another.

I never much like thus being told without possibility of reply what I am to think about people whom I know.

So difficult is it for us to know, with the dead as with the living, whether a thing would cause them joy or sorrow!

Love is space and time made apprehensible to the heart.

Knowing a thing does not always mean preventing a thing, but at least the things we know, we hold, if not in our hands, at least in our minds where we can arrange them as we like, which gives us the illusion of a sort of power over them.