Quotes About Understanding

To see the act of learning as something not for its own sake but because of what it will get you reduces the wonder of humanity. We are thinking, feeling, art-making, knowledge-hungry, marvellous animals, who understand ourselves and our world through the act of learning. It is an end in itself. It has far more to offer than the things it lets us write on application forms. It is a way to love living right now.

It may seem strange, falling in love with someone because of a gesture, but sometimes you can read an entire person in a single moment. The way you can study a grain of sand and understand the universe. Love at first sight might or might not be a thing, but love in a single moment is.

That, I suppose, is a price we pay for love: the absorbing of another's pain as if our own.

All a writer can do is provide a match, and hopefully a dry one. The reader has to strike the flame into being.

Stigma is particularly cruel for depressives, because stigma affects thoughts and depression is a disease of thoughts.

It' hard to explain depression to people who haven't suffered from it. It is like explaining life on Earth to an alien. The reference points just aren't there. You have to resort to metaphors.

For decades and decades and decades I have bemoaned people who say they feel old, but I now realise it is perfectly possible for anyone to feel old. All they need to do is become a teacher.

Because the possibility of pain is where love stems from.

Unlike a book or a film depression doesn't have to be about something.

One frustration with anxiety is that it is often hard to find a reason behind it. There may be no visible threat and yet you can feel utterly terrorized.

You are no less or more of a man or a woman or a human for having depression than you would be for having cancer or cardiovascular disease or a car accident.

To say how I was feeling would lead to feeling more of what I was feeling.

To read, to seek, to know.

There are as many versions of a book as there are readers.

No wonder they were a species of primitives. By the time they have read enough books to actually reach a state of knowledge where they can do anything with it, they are dead.

You are not the only one with sorrows in this world. Don't hoard them like they are precious. There is always plenty of them to go around.

The first rule of marriage: solve the mystery, end the love.

Soon, I told myself, I would understand what the heavily articulated greeting "get off the fucking road you fucking wanker" actually meant.

Yet people still don't think depression really that bad. If they did, they wouldn't say the things they say.

Friend: Someone who will tell you the truth, often mistaken for an enemy.

The moment we try and turn a thought into words we place it into a shared world. This shared world we call 'language', Once we take our personal unseen experiences and make them seen, we help others, and even ourselves, to understand what we are going through. What we say aloud can never quite capture what we feel inside, but that is almost the point. Words don't capture, they release.

Why depression is hard to understand IT IS INVISIBLE. It is not "feeling a bit sad.

An impossibility is just a possibility you don't understand yet.

You are no less or more of a man or a woman or a human for having depression than you would be for having cancer or cardiovascular disease or a car accident. So what should we do? Talk. Listen. Encourage talking. Encourage listening. Keep adding to the conversation. Stay on the lookout for those wanting to join in the conversation.