Quotes About Understanding

What would it be like to live with a person capable of joy?

Clem didn't know a man who worked more passionately for social justice than his father, and when you really loved someone, the whole person, you simply accepted the little things you might have wished were different. He could see eyes being rolled when his father waxed religious at a fellowship meeting, but Becky herself rolled her eyes like that. It didn't mean she didn't love him.

How many times had he read the word joy without having experienced what it meant?

To have an identity, you have to believe that other identities equally exist. You need closeness with other people. And how is closeness built? By sharing secrets.

They had the beauty of the second glance, the beauty that only revealed itself with intimacy.

The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.

Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

If you really want to change someone's mind on a moral or political matter, you'll need to see things from that person's angle as well as your own. And if you do truly see it the other person's way—deeply and intuitively—you might even find your own mind opening in response. Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it's very difficult to empathize across a moral divide.

Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind.

If Americans had to discriminate directly against other people's children, I believe most citizens would find this morally abhorrent. Denial, in an active sense, of other people's children is, however, rarely necessary in this nation. Inequality is mediated for us by a taxing system that most people do not fully understand and seldom scrutinize.

Segregation, he concluded, "is neither sought nor imposed by healthy Ã¢â'¬Â¦ human beings.

At the age of eighty-three he had the self-awareness necessary to be patient with other people, but not always the facility to disguise the effort.

People have to be patient when they're talking to a nervous person.

Eso es muy superficial. - No se puede ser profundo sin superficie.

I gained an insight, a purloined-letter kind of thing.

Thing is, for me a woman has to have a certain amount of muffling, you know what I mean? Something between you, in the way of insulation. Otherwise, you're right up against her naked soul.

You can't be deep without a surface.

The truth is the truth. What changes is what we know about it and what we're willing to believe.

She wept for the hurt that he owned, a hurt she could never hope to remove.

All forms of poor communication have one thing in common: They ask the person on the other end of the line to do more work than they should have to.

Cultural listening is the skill of being able to see beyond the symptom to the underlying dynamic. It's an extremely powerful tool to develop as a leader, whether you're the CEO, a team leader, or a solopreneur just starting out.

Henry said, getting up to piss against a tree, the coming of the white man ain't all bad. I like the Chinooks and all, the Flatheads, too, but there's something about talking in your native tongue that just lets the friendship flow better.

The test of faith is whether I can make space for difference. Can I recognize God's image in someone who is not in my image, who language, faith, ideal, are different from mine? If I cannot, then I have made God in my image instead of allowing him to remake me in his.

Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean.