Quotes About Understanding

deep inside I know that trying to figure things out leads to blindness, that the desire to understand has a built-in brutality that erases what you seek to comprehend. Only experience is sensitive.

The writers see where we're headed before the scientists do. What we discover in nature is not really a matter of what exists; what we find is determined by our ability to understand.

Tell us, they'll say to me. So we will understand and be able to resolve things. They'll be mistaken. It's only the things you don't understand that you can resolve. There will be no resolution.

For there is nothing hid, which shall not be manifested; neither was any thing kept secret, but that it should come abroad.' Mark 4:22.

Europeans need easy explanations; they will always choose a simple lie over a contradictory truth.

like many elderly people, she has developed a selective sense of hearing. She ignores me and continues on her own track...

I have lost the sense of how to tackle a believing European.

This could be one reason I've never burdened my life with children—I've thought too much about why people lose the courage to look each other in the eye.

Very few people know how to listen. Their haste pulls them out of the conversation, or they try internally to improve the situation, or they're preparing what their entrance will be when you shut up and it's their turn to step on stage.

You can learn something about your fellow human beings from what they write in the margin

There is one way to understand another culture. Living it. Move into it, ask to be tolerated as a guest, learn the language. At some point understanding may come. It will always be wordless. The moment you grasp what is foreign, you will lose the urge to explain it. To explain a phenomenon is to distance yourself from

Bertrand Russell wrote that pure mathematics is the field in which we don't know what we're talking about or to what extent what we say is true or false.

Wir verkümmern, lieber Herr Doktor, weil wir nur noch meinen und nicht mehr denken.

Logic doesn't work in human relations, I guess," he told Ella. "I try to understand myself as I tried to understand the bosses in my muckraking days. I 'got' them, but not myself. I don't know anything about myself.

Being with Steffens is to me like flashes of clear light; it is as if I see him, and myself, and the world, with new eyes." Steffens

my conviction that the Holocaust is no less historically explicable than any other human experience, though the job is not easy.

Love is not a feeling.  It's an ability.

She loves me-she just doesn't know it yet.

No 'buts', Gilbert. You just make sense to me. It's nothing more special than that.

He sees me through the glass. We both nod like we give a small shit about each other.

It is okay for people you love to leave. For them to come and go. She taught it to me over and over.

She thought that one might not make a dent in the Great Sadness, but one could help make another person whole.

Never know how you feel about someone until they die and come back.

Is it possible to love by simply not being an ass? I don't think so. But it goes a long way to clearing a space where love can happen.