Quotes About Understanding

A lot of people don't realize depression is an illness. I don't wish it on anyone, but if they would know how it feels, I swear they would think twice before they just shrug it.

All truth is given by revelation, either general or special, and it must be received by reason. Reason is the God-given means for discovering the truth that God discloses, whether in his world or his Word. While God wants to reach the heart with truth, he does not bypass the mind.

He that has doctrinal knowledge and speculation only, without affection, never is engaged in the business of religion.

Truth is the agreement of our ideas with the ideas of God.

Seek not to grow in knowledge chiefly for the sake of applause, and to enable you to dispute with others; but seek it for the benefit of your souls.

One of these grand defects, as I humbly conceive, is this, that children are habituated to learning without understanding.

I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live... - Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.

I admire your capacity for admiring.

Stupidity mistook itself for intelligence, whereas intelligence knew its own stupidity.

How could I have thought that I needed to cure myself in order to fit into the 'real' world? I didn't need curing, and the world didn't, either; the only thing that did need curing was my understanding of my place in it. Without that understanding - without a sense of belonging to the real world - it was impossible to thrive in an imagined one.

The world was overpopulated with talkers and underpopulated by listeners

What he'd never understood about men in his position, in all the books he'd read and movies he'd seen about them, was clearer to him now: you couldn't keep expecting wholehearted love without, at some point, requiting it. There was no credit to be earned for simply being good.

there are few things harder to imagine than other people's conversations about yourself.

It's good to have friends in life. If you want to have friends, you have to remember that nobody's perfect.

He was realizing too late that old people weren't entirely stupid.

It seems not to occur to you that I might have had other very smart patients. The difference between them and me is that I'm a psychologist and they are not. I don't have to be as smart as you to help you. I only have to be smart about one thing.

Walter non aveva mai capito come vivere, ma adesso lo capiva meno che mai

The world was overpopulated with talkers and underpopulated by listeners, and many of her sources gave her the impression that she was the first person who'd ever truly listened to them.

He suspected that somewhere, somehow, this new technology was stupid or lazy. Some young engineer had taken a shortcut and failed to anticipate the consequences that he was suffering now. But because he didn't understand the technology, he had no way to know the nature of the failure or to take steps to correct it. And so the goddamned lights made a victim of him, and there wasn't a goddamned thing he could do except go out and spend.

To love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.

You could slap his wrist for saying it, but then he said it with his face, and you could spank him for making faces, but then he said it with his eyes, and there were limits to correction—no way, in the end, to penetrate behind the blue irises and eradicate a boy's disgust.

Dogs again had it right. They didn't trouble themselves with mysteries that could never be solved anyway.

it would have been better to have forced herself to see more of her parents in the critical years of her own parenthood, so as to better understand her kids' response to her.