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Quotes About Understanding

At the end of seven hundred and twelve pages of this manuscript,' he had reported, 'after innumerable griefs at being drowned in unfathomable developments and irritating impatience at never being able to rise to the surface – one doesn't have a single, but not a single clue of what this is about. What is the point of all this? What does it all mean? Where is it all leading? Impossible to know anything about it!
~ Alain de Botton
Our understanding of love has been hijacked and beguiled by its first distractingly moving moments. We have allowed our love stories to end way too early. We seem to know far too much about how love starts, and recklessly little about how it might continue.
~ Alain de Botton
You can tell a paragraph is slipping out of control when there's a runaway use of the word 'hence.
~ Alain de Botton
We should add: it is a privilege to be the recipient of a sulk; it means the other person respects and trusts us enough to think we should understand their unspoken hurt. It is one of the odder gifts of love.
~ Alain de Botton
A fundamental truth, is that there is simply no such thing as an inherently boring person or thing. People are only in danger of coming across as such when they either fail to understand their deeper selves or don't dare or know how to communicate them to others. 
~ Alain de Botton
He entertains a confused wish to help her, without, however, understanding that help can be a challenging gift to deliver to those who are most in need of it.
~ Alain de Botton
The most courageous act in politics is to try to understand your opponent.
~ Alain de Botton
There is, in the early period of love, a measure of sheer relief at being able, at last, to reveal so much of what needed to be kept hidden for the sake of propriety. We can admit to not being as respectable or as sober, as even-keeled, or as "normal" as society believes. We can be childish, imaginative, wild, hopeful, cynical, fragile, and multiple; all of this our lover can understand and accept us for. At
~ Alain de Botton
It seems easier to respond to our enthusiasms by trading in facts than by investigating the more naive question of how and why we have been moved
~ Alain de Botton
Kendimizi bildik bileli burçlara ve kiÅŸisel fallara merak duymam?z?n nedeni,anla??lma tutkumuzu uyand?r?yor olmalar?d?r.
~ Alain de Botton
The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding, even if, as Proust warns is, 'when we discover the true lives of other people, the real world beneath the world of appearance, we get as many surprises as on visiting a house of plain exterior which is full of hidden treasures, torture-chambers or skeletons.
~ Alain de Botton
One has to go into relationships with equal expectations, ready to give as much as the other
~ Alain de Botton
To grow interested in any piece of information, we need somewhere to 'put' it, which means some way of connecting it to an issue we already now how to care about.
~ Alain de Botton
He will need to learn that love is a skill rather than an enthusiasm.
~ Alain de Botton
We are ready for relationships not when we have encountered perfection, but when we have grown willing to give flaws the charitable interpretations they deserve. This is because the success or failure of a relationship doesn't hinge on whether the other is deeply flawed – they are. What matters is how we interpret their failings; how we understand the reasons why they have previously been and will again in the future be very difficult to be with.
~ Alain de Botton
There is no such thing as a hurt that is too small to matter when emotional closeness is at stake.
~ Alain de Botton
It is when we find points of connection to the foreign that we are able to grow.
~ Alain de Botton
We should add: it is a privilege to be the recipient of a sulk; it means the other person respects and trusts us enough to think we should understand their unspoken hurt. It is one of the odder gifts of love. Eventually
~ Alain de Botton
We must live with our enemies as if they might one day become our friends, and live with our friends as if they might some time or other become our enemies'.
~ Alain de Botton
Therefore, in the mature account of love, we should never fall at first glance. We should reserve our leap until we have completed a clear-eyed investigation of the depths and nature of the waters. Only after we have undertaken a thorough exchange of opinions on parenting, politics, art, science, and appropriate snacks for the kitchen should two people ever decide they are ready to love each other.
~ Alain de Botton
Un paradox al c?rÈ›ilor scrise de alÈ›i oameni este c? ele ne spun adesea mai multe despre propria noastr? via?? decât am fost în stare s? înÈ›elegem singuri.
~ Alain de Botton
We should add: it is a privilege to be the recipient of a sulk; it means the other person respects and trusts us enough to think we should understand their unspoken hurt.
~ Alain de Botton
É um sinal de que duas pessoas tenham parado de amar uma a outra (ou pelo menos parado de desejar fazer o esforço que constitui noventa por cento do amor)quando não são mais capazes de transformar diferenças em piadas.
~ Alain de Botton
My dear friend, I may be dense,' replied Humblot after having taken a brief and clearly bewildering glance at the opening of the novel, 'but I fail to see why a chap needs thirty pages to describe how he tosses and turns in bed before falling asleep.
~ Alain de Botton