Quotes About Understanding

They were lonely and sad people, all three of them, and they would not make one another less sad, but they could, with great care, make a world that would accommodate their loneliness.

Nabokov once answered a question he must have been tired of being asked: "My private tragedy, which cannot, indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural language." That something is called a tragedy, however, means it is no longer personal. One weeps out of private pain, but only when the audience swarms in to claim understanding and empathy do they call it tragedy. One's grief belongs to oneself; one's tragedy, to others.

To say we know a person is to write that person off. This is at times life's necessity. We run out of time or patience or curiosity; or we depart, willingly or not, from the situation that makes investigation possible and necessary. A person written off may become a character - depending on the charity of memory.

Only later, when I met more girls, when I got to know my nieces and nephews, did I understand that Fabienne and I shared something not often available to children (or adults, for that matter). Neither of us felt intense love toward our parents, or intense resentment. And the world was made of people who were not that different from our parents, so it was only natural that neither of us felt intense love or intense resentment toward anyone. We had each other, and for a long time that was enough.

who can shorten the distance between two people so they can say with confidence that they have reached each other?

Two people who are constantly seeking experience rarely settle for each other. Two people enduring experience rarely meet in life. That's why Fabienne and I were meant for each other. We were the perfect pair, one seeking all that the other could experience.

They were all sufferers in their despicable pain, every one of them, and what right did he have to laugh at the woman whose husband was pouring his heart out to him, a man in sincere confession to a fellowman?

The younger sweepers in the department joked behind Shaokang's back that he loved the brooms as his own children, but Mrs. Hua saw nothing wrong in that and knew that the joke would come only from young people who understood little of parenthood.

he was then thirty-two, still too young to understand how limitless men's desires were, or the absurdity of such greed.

Being known, then, must not be far from being imprisoned by someone else's thought

Most men are undertakers of their women's dreams. And, of course, most women are undertakers of their men's dreams, too.

It is difficult for anyone to watch someone close suffer. The grief comes from not understanding the pain, and from knowing that suffering, even when it ends, will live on as memory. A child does not, and should not, understand her parents' memories, yet this incomprehension does not offer exemption. The child in every one of us carries the burden of memory's melodrama, not only our own, but those before our time.

Though evasion rarely leads to joy; there is, one must admit, a sense of joy if one can dissect something, oneself included, with precision.

everyone has a story or two about that hard-earned lesson of giving more than is asked.

You can see a lot by just looking.

If you want to learn something, read about it. If you want to understand something, write about it. If you want to master something, teach it.

Recognize the other person is you.

Life is a book of changes. It should be read only to understand how it works. You can't help the changes in life; they must come whether they are good or bad because the good must follow the bad and the bad must follow the good. T

Because he had been- and in many ways still was- such a brilliant man, he no doubt understood the nature of his memory problem. It wasn't pride that prevented him from asking for help but a deep aversion to causing more trouble than necessary for those of us who lived in the normal world.

He preferred smart questions to smart answers.

The fact is that man's mind is limited, and his understanding only partial. The biblical narrative makes this point unequivocally with respect to Moses, in reporting that he could not see God's face, but only his back.59 And it was no less true of the other prophets of Israel, who saw things in different ways because each of them was limited in his understanding, and to his own point of vantage.60

the purpose of the biblical editors, in gathering together such diverse and often sharply conflicting texts, was not to construct a unitary work with an unequivocal message. It was rather to assemble a work capable of capturing and reflecting a given tradition of inquiry so readers could strive to understand the various perspectives embraced by this tradition, and in so doing build up an understanding of their own.

Experience itself depends on memory, which permits us to recall facts and to draw our conclusions from them, on which facts reasoning is based.

We may all possess wisdom if we are willing to be persuaded that the experience of others is as useful as our own.