Understanding Quotes

In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them.... I destroy them.

~ Orson Scott Card

Be the one who nurtures and builds. Be the one who has an understanding and a forgiving heart one who looks for the best in people. Leave people better than you found them.

~ Marvin J. Ashton

The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.

~ Meister Eckhart

Love is made up of three unconditional properties in equal measure:1. Acceptance2. Understanding3. AppreciationRemove any one of the three and the triangle falls apart.Which, by the way, is something highly inadvisable. Think about it — do you really want to live in a world of only two dimensions?So, for the love of a triangle, please keep love whole.

~ Vera Nazarian

Men build too many walls and not enough bridges.

~ Joseph Fort Newton

When you were in love, you were capable of learning everything and of knowing things you had never dared even to think, because love was the key to understanding all of the mysteries.

~ Paulo Coelho

None of us can choose where we shall love...

~ Susan Kay

True love is born from understanding.

~ Gautama Buddha

And we all know love is a glass which makes even a monster appear fascinating.

~ Alberto Moravia

It's not at all hard to understand a person it's only hard to listen without bias.

~ Criss Jami

If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in.

~ Frederick Buechner

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.

~ Søren Kierkegaard

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.

~ Marie Curie

Sometimes all a person wants is an empathetic ear, all he or she needs is to talk it out. Just offering a listening ear and an understanding heart for his or her suffering can be a big comfort.

~ Roy T. Bennett

Very occasionally, if you pay really close attention, life doesn't suck.

~ Joss Whedon

To perceive is to suffer.

~ Aristotle

In order to move on, you must understand why you felt what you did and why you no longer need to feel it.

~ Mitch Albom

It’s always about timing. If it’s too soon, no one understands. If it’s too late, everyone’s forgotten.

~ Anna Wintour

To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or, at least, the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology, or in states of mind that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings.We may seek, too, a relaxing of inhibitions that makes it easier to bond with each other, or transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in.

~ Oliver Sacks

I don't understand a thing about this world: about people, and why they do the things they do. The more I find out, the more I uncover, the more I know, the less I understand.

~ Craig Silvey

All I know is I make sense to me- it's other people who seem complicated.

~ Tara Kelly

There are times when a feeling of expectancy comes to me, as if something is there, beneath the surface of my understanding, waiting for me to grasp it. It is the same tantalizing sensation when you almost remember a name, but don't quite reach it. I can feel it when I think of human beings, of the hints of evolution suggested by the removal of wisdom teeth, the narrowing of the jaw no longer needed to chew such roughage as it was accustomed to; the gradual disappearance of hair from the human body; the adjustment of the human eye to the fine print, the swift, colored motion of the twentieth century. The feeling comes, vague and nebulous, when I consider the prolonged adolesence of our species; the rites of birth, marriage and death; all the primitive, barbaric ceremonies streamlined to modern times. Almost, I think, the unreasoning, bestial purity was best. Oh, something is there, waiting for me. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst in upon me and I will see the other side of this monumental grotesque joke. And then I'll laugh. And then I'll know what life is.

~ Sylvia Plath

Understanding is the first step to acceptance, and only with acceptance can there be recovery.

~ J.k. Rowling

Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.

~ Anaïs Nin

No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.

~ Sigmund Freud

When we fully understand the brevity of life, its fleeting joys and unavoidable pains; when we accept the facts that all men and women are approaching an inevitable doom: the consciousness of it should make us more kindly and considerate of each other. This feeling should make men and women use their best efforts to help their fellow travelers on the road, to make the path brighter and easier as we journey on. It should bring a closer kinship, a better understanding, and a deeper sympathy for the wayfarers who must live a common life and die a common death.

~ Clarence Darrow

No adolescent ever wants to be understood, which is why they complain about being misunderstood all the time.

~ Stephen Fry

Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! 'Have courage to use your own reason!'- that is the motto of enlightenment.

~ Immanuel Kant

To learn is not to know; there are the learners and the learned. Memory makes the one, philosophy the others.

~ Alexandre Dumas

To better understand God we must first shatter our own idea of God - maybe even day after day. Maybe he's too great to stay compressed in the human mind. Maybe he splits it wide open; this is why pretentious intellectualism so often fails to comprehend the concept of God: it is only accepting of what it can explain while in the process finding higher sources offensive. What we may confidently assert is that faith is the opening that allows God, this unpredictable, unseen power, to travel in and out of the mind without all the pains of confusion.

~ Criss Jami

O how incomprehensible everything was, and actually sad, although it was also beautiful. One knew nothing. One lived and ran about the earth and rode through forests, and certain things looked so challenging and promising and nostalgic: a star in the evening, a blue harebell, a reed-green pond, the eye of a person or a cow. And sometimes it seemed that something never seen yet long desired was about to happen, that a veil would drop from it all, but then it passed, nothing happened, the riddle remained unsolved, the secret spell unbroken, and in the end one grew old and looked cunning . . . or wise . . . and still one knew nothing perhaps, was still waiting and listening.

~ Hermann Hesse

Medicine rests upon four pillars—philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, and ethics. The first pillar is the philosophical knowledge of earth and water; the second, astronomy, supplies its full understanding of that which is of fiery and airy nature; the third is an adequate explanation of the properties of all the four elements—that is to say, of the whole cosmos—and an introduction into the art of their transformations; and finally, the fourth shows the physician those virtues which must stay with him up until his death, and it should support and complete the three other pillars.

~ Paracelsus

Before you hate something you should try to understand it.

~ Martha Grimes

There would be no society if living together depended upon understanding each other.

~ Eric Hoffer

If we cannot comprehend God in his visible works, how then in his inconceivable thoughts, that call the works into being?

~ Edgar Allan Poe

Love is a chemical reaction,But it cannot be fully understood or defined by science.And though a body cannot exist without a soul,It too cannot be fully understood or defined by science.Love is the most powerful form of energy,But science cannot decipher its elements.Yet the best cure for a sick soul is love,But even the most advanced physicianCannot prescribe it as medicine.INCOMPLETE SCIENCE by Suzy Kassem

~ Suzy Kassem

Marriage can be made to work if both the partners can see beyond themselves and understand the limitations,needs and abilities of the other person and are willing to embrace the positive and negative aspects of each other in their understanding.But it never happens that way. We expect others to understand and comply with us while we fail to do the same.Thus marriage loses all it's sheen by the time the couple reaches middle age.

~ Chitralekha Paul

By the time we began to understand enough about what the world to ask the right questions, our visit is over, and someone else is visiting, asking the same questions.

~ D.k. Levick

People are, generally speaking, either dead certain or totally indifferent (Both types are crawling around deep down in the rabbit's fur!)

~ Jostein Gaarder

Manlius ... took care in his invitations, actively sought to exclude from his circle crude and vulgar men like Caius Valerius. But they were all around; it was Manlius who lived in a dream world, and his bubble of civility was becoming smaller and smaller. Caius Valerius, powerful member of a powerful family, had never even heard of Plato. A hundred, even fifty years before, such an absurdity would have been inconceivable. Now it was surprising if such a man did know anything of philosophy, and even if it was explained, he would not wish to understand.

~ Iain Pears