Quotes About Understanding

She can't have understood you: you are so utterly different from ordinary men. That's what I liked about you when I first saw you; I felt at once that you weren't like everybody else.

The stellar universe is not so difficult of comprehension as the real actions of other people.

learned to distinguish between these states which reigned alternately in my mind, during certain periods, going so far as to divide every day between them, each one returning to dispossess the other with the regularity of a fever and ague: contiguous, and yet so foreign to one another, so devoid of means of communication, that I could no longer understand, or even picture to myself, in one state what I had desired or dreaded or even done in the other.

And we shall love it longer than the rest because we have taken longer to get to love it. The time, moreover, that a person requires—as I required in the matter of this sonata—to penetrate a work of any depth is merely an epitome, a symbol, one might say, of the years, the centuries even that must elapse before the public can begin to cherish a masterpiece that is really new.

what brings men together is not a community of views but a consanguinity of minds.

There are few who are worthy to understand what I feel... I seek out those who are of this chosen few, and I avoid the rest.

Our belief that a person takes part in an unknown life which his or her love would allow us to enter is, of all that love demands in order to come into being, what it prizes the most, and what makes it care little for the rest.

If the idea of death during this period had, as we have seen, cast a gloom over love, the memory of love had for a long time now helped me not to be afraid of death. For I understood that dying was not something new but quite the reverse, that since my childhood I had already died a number of times.

I came to recognise that, apart from her [Françoise's] own kinsfolk, the sufferings of humanity inspired in her a pity which increased in direct ratio to the distance separating the sufferers from herself.

C'est la vie qui peu à peu, cas par cas, nous permet de remarquer que ce qui est le plus important pour notre coeur, ou pour notre esprit, ne nous est pas appris par le raisonnement mais par des puissances autres.

Cada lector es, cuando lee, el propio lector de sí mismo. La obra del escritor no es más que una especie de instrumento óptico ofrecido al lector para permitirle discernir lo que, sin ese libro, no hubiera podido ver en sí mismo.

Os que vêm a conhecer algum detalhe exato da vida alheia tiram logo consequências que não o são, e veem no fato recém-descoberto a explicação de coisas que precisamente não têm nenhuma relação com ele.

We ought never to lose our tempers with people who, when we find them at fault, begin to snigger. They do so not because they are laughing at us, but because they are afraid of our displeasure.

For one cannot have a perfect knowledge, one cannot effect the complete absorption of a person who disdains one, so long as one has not overcome her disdain.

sterile, splendid torture of understanding and loving...

Notre sagesse commence où celle de l'auteur finit, nous voudrions qu'il nous donnât des réponses, quand tout ce qu'il peut faire est de nous donner des désirs.

So that every fresh encounter is a sort of rectification, which brings us back to what we really did see. We have no longer any recollection of this, to such an extent does what we call remembering a person consist really in forgetting him.

Not to know at large of things remote From use, obscure and subtle, but to know That which before us lies in daily life, Is the prime wisdom.

Truth and understanding are not such wares as to be monopolized and traded in by tickets and statutes and standards.

I was all ear, And took in strains that might create a soul Under the ribs of Death.

There is reason for optimism when one moves from ignorance to understanding but no guarantees.

We have to stop marketing to people the way we hate to be marketed to.

How narrow we selfish conceited creatures are in our sympathies! How blind to the rights of all the rest of creation!

I am learning to live close to the lives of my friends without ever seeing them. No miles of any measurement can separate your soul from mine.