Quotes About Understanding

Here were two people who had penetrated farther than she into the labyrinth of the wedded state, and struggled through some of its thorniest passages; and yet both, one consciously, the other half-unaware, testified to the mysterious fact which was already dawning on her: that the influence of a marriage begun in mutual understanding is too deep not to reassert itself even in the moment of flight and denial.

He and she belonged to each other for always: he understood that now. The impulse which had first drawn them together again, in spite of reason, in spite of themselves almost, that deep-seated instinctive need that each had of the other, would never again wholly let them go.

More than half a lifetime divided them, and she had spent the long interval among people he did not know, in a society he but faintly guessed at, in conditions he would never wholly understand.

The one woman knew but did not understand; the other, it seemed, understood without knowing.

Her tone and her look still enveloped her in a soft inaccessibility and Archer groaned out again: I dont understand you!

He could not bear the thought that a barrier of words should drop between them again

Her head bent back, she took his kiss, and then drew apart. The sparkle in his eyes she understood to be as much an invitation to her bloom as a tribute to her sagacity.

Don't you know how, in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time not what one wants to but what one can?

Her incapacity to recognise change made her children conceal their views from her as Archer concealed his;

Jamás os pedíais nada el uno al otro, ¿verdad? Y nunca os contabais nada. Os sentabais, os mirabais y adivinabais lo que pasaba por dentro. ¡Un asilo de sordomudos, en definitiva!

No debes pensar que una chica sabe tan poco como imaginan sus padres. Una oye, una se da cuenta..., una tiene sus propios sentimientos e ideas.

Don't judge us too harshly—or not, at least, till you have taken the trouble to learn our point of view. You consider the individual—we think only of the family.

Prin liniÈ™tea ei, din care lipsea orice nuan?? de surpriz?, prin simplitatea ei, izbutea s? înl?ture orice convenÈ›ie, f?cându-l s? înÈ›eleag? cât de firesc era, pentru doi vechi prieteni care aveau s?-È™i spun? atâtea, s? caute s? fie singuri.

If ever we should find ourselves disposed not to admire those writers or artists, Livy and Virgil for instance, Raphael or Michael Angelo, whom all the learned had admired, [we ought] not to follow our own fancies, but to study them until we know how and what we ought to admire; and if we cannot arrive at this combination of admiration with knowledge, rather to believe that we are dull, than that the rest of the world has been imposed on.

Nothing is such an enemy to accuracy of judgment as a coarse discrimination; a want of such classification and distribution as the subject admits of.

The wild gas, the fixed air is plainly broke loose: but we ought to suspend our judgments until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agitation of the troubled and frothy surface. [Alluding to Joseph Priestley's Observations on Air]

it were better to get simplicity, if certainty is not to be had

But let it be considered that hardly anything can strike the mind with its greatness, which does not make some sort of approach towards infinity; which nothing can do whilst we are able to perceive its bounds; but to see an object distinctly, and to perceive its bounds, is one and the same thing. A clear idea is therefore another name for a little idea.

We are not made at once to pity the oppressor and the oppressed.

Intellect stood aside and informed him of this fact.

Well, we seem to have it.

What I cannot understand about the Russian," Roosevelt complained, "is the way he will lie when he knows perfectly well that you know he is lying.

Fréquenter un écrivain, le connaître de près, dans l'espoir de mieux connaître son oeuvre était un exercice inutile et même destructeur.

Je rêvais continuellement, durant mon adolescence au pensionnat, d'un adulte (mon prof de gym, l'un des peintres de l'école d'art où nous allions prendre des cours - qui s'occuperait de moi, devinerait mes pensées, anticiperait mes besoins (car je ne les aurais jamais exprimés et lui, s'il m'aimait, serait capable de lire en moi).