Quotes About Understanding

Patting a shoulder can be anything from an apology to a promise, and only the patter can say which.

You are headstrong and I am magisterial. Our tolerance of each other is a constantly recurring miracle.

When I finished, explaining that I had let him go because I was human, as he had said, he held it for another minute and then opened his eyes. He grunted. "You are not more human than I am. You are merely more susceptible, more sociable, and more vulnerable.

Orrie's strong point was getting people to tell him things. It wasn't so much the questions he asked. As a matter of fact, he wasn't very good at questions; it was just the way he looked at them. Something about him made people feel that he ought to be told things.

One reason I like to work for him is that he never rides me for not acting the way he would act. He knows what I can do and that's all he ever expects; but he sure expects that.

As I closed the door behind me he started to scorch me with an indignant look for being gone so long, but when he saw my face, which he knows better than I do, he abandoned it. 'Well?' he asked mildly.

Will she report what she told me?' 'No.' A corner of his mouth twitched. 'That's why I put up with you; you could have answered with fifty words and you did it with one.' 'I've often wondered. Now tell me why I put up with you.' 'That's beyond conjecture. ...

The ideal human agreement is one in which distinctions of race and color and religion are totally disregarded;

Perhaps you don't know all there is to know about a woman after watching her at an evening of bridge, but you should know more than when you sat down.

A person who does not read cannot think. He may have good mental processes, but he has nothing to think about. You can feel for people or natural phenomena and react to them, but they are not ideas. You cannot think about them." [ Life magazine, December 10, 1965]

Women don't require motives that are comprehensible to my intellectual processes. (Nero Wolfe)

Understanding is forgiveness. - Sonnet XV

we are born with the power to hear, we must learn to listen. we are born with the power to see, we must learn to understand. we are born with the power to make mistakes, we must learn to accept and forgive

In the next long minute, he felt an understanding spread deep down inside him, an understanding that he'd only felt with animals before--with poor old Hilda and the hawks he'd seen in tall bare trees and that buck deer, long ago in the woods, that spoke Ben's name and told him the world was a fine place to live, hard but fine.

Minds are not changed merely through acquiring data or information (if that were the case it would take no effort to convince Americans that Obama is, in fact, a Christian). Rather, it is solely through the slow and steady building of personal relationships that one discovers the fundamental truth that all people everywhere have the same dreams and aspirations, that all people struggle with the same fears and anxieties.

At some point you have to take responsibility for who you are and where you are and being able to listen to other points of view, whichever side of the tracks you're on.

My work as a whole is about excavating and shining a light on pieces of history that not only need to be seen and heard, but that can also add to the conversation about what's going on now.

People say, I'm tired of thinking about race, it's a drag. Yeah, well, welcome to my life! I don't care who you are. We have the time and the headspace for this stuff. The least you can do is take a moment.

If you care about hundreds, you have to care about one." - Wraith

Being gentle puts compassion to work and overrides your need to be right

Relationships are like soup: they are better the longer they simmer

When judgment ceases, communication and connection increases

You can master your fears. But first you have to know them.

Acceptance is the greatest gift you can give to another human being