Understanding Quotes

When picking a leader, choose a peacemaker. One who unites, not divides. A cultured leader who supports the arts and true freedom of speech, not censorship.

~ Suzy Kassem

Simon: You're in a dangerous line of work, Jayne. Odds are you'll be under my knife again, often. So I want you to understand one thing very clearly: No matter what you do or say or plot, no matter how you come down on us, I will never, ever harm you. You're on this table, you're safe... 'cause I'm your medic. And however little we may like or trust each other, we're on the same crew. Got the same troubles, same enemies, and more than enough of both. Now, we could circle each other and growl, sleep with one eye open, but that thought wearies me. I don't care what you've done, I don't know what you're planning on doing, but I'm trusting you. I think you should do the same. 'Cause I don't see this working any other way. River: Also, I can kill you with my brain.

~ Ben Edlund

Not every single way of saying the right thing is right.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

[T]he enduring problem for liberals, as for everyone else, is not whether history will judge them wise or foolish regarding the war on terrorism; it is, rather, the way that the past decade has splintered them away from other Americans. This fracture comes with a steep price: in today's toxic atmosphere, liberals are no less cynical, shortsighted, and parochial than anyone else, and they understand their fellow-Americans just as badly as they themselves are understood. When liberals look at red-state voters, they see either a mob of pious know-nothings or the insensible victims of militarism and class warfare. Yet.... [such people] defy fixed categories, which means that they have to be figured out the hard way--on their own terms.

~ George Packer

It is not for you to say - you Englishmen, who have conquered your freedom so long ago, that you have conveniently forgotten what blood you shed, and what extremities you proceeded to in the conquering - it is not for you to say how far the worst of all exasperations may, or may not, carry the maddened men of an enslaved nation. The iron that has entered into our souls has gone too deep for you to find it. Leave the refugee alone! Laugh at him, distrust him, open your eyes in wonder at the secret self which smolders in him, sometimes under the every-day respectability and tranquility of a man like me - sometimes under the grinding poverty, the fierce squalor, of men less lucky, less pliable, less patient than I am - but judge us not. In the time of your first Charles you might have done us justice - the long luxury of your freedom has made you incapable of doing us justice now.

~ Wilkie Collins

...if one is to confer successfully with foreigners, it is essential to know their ways of thinking and be able to put oneself in their place.

~ Miklós Bánffy

True understanding involves sincere honesty and holistic, deep listening without the political corruption of evil power players. ~ Angelica Hopes, an excerpt from my book K.H. trilogy

~ Angelica Hopes

Having the understanding of God, God’s ambassadors are able to bring a country out of crisis, change politics, business and economy

~ Sunday Adelaja

Empathize with others. You may easily get into a situation where you need the understanding of others.

~ Eraldo Banovac

In my experience, men who understand women seem to rarely want to have anything to do with them.

~ Khaled Hosseini

For a woman's words to wound would require a man to listen first!

~ Meredith Duran

Understanding why so many western women are giving birth to unnaturally large babies that either damage the birth canal or will not fit down it is one of the greatest challenges to modern medicine.

~ Steven Magee

Women invented misery, but we don't understand it.

~ Rita Dove

There is no perfection, only beautiful versions of brokenness.

~ Shannon L. Alder

No matter what we think we should do, I don’t think you can coerce yourself into loving your neighbor—or your boss—when you can’t stand him. But if you try to understand your feelings of dislike with mindfulness and compassion, being sure not to forget self-compassion, you create the possibility for change.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Curiosity—asking questions—isn’t just a way of understanding the world. It’s a way of changing it.

~ Brian Grazer

A bitter critic is the sweetest corrector.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

After all relationships had sell-by dates. Sometimes, the ones with the most passion were the ones to burn out faster. Others had a sweet and long-winding coil which burned with slow amicability. At times, it was true, people rekindled a dying ember with a new flame. But they hardly ever noticed the rekindling had come after some time of estrangement - whether physical or emotional. Because people needed newness to make a thing last indefinitely. To make it really last. And because Jan didn't like letting people go, she knew to look for the signs of love's waning. So she could tell how to ease it down slowly into its grave and keep her lovers as friends. Because she really believed people were meant to cross paths. People were meant to stay in your life. There was a reason for all encounters. And relationships had to be cosseted, no matter their shelf life. But they had to be allowed to change shape and form. It had to be given space to grow into something different.

~ Adelheid Manefeldt

When you’re a kid, you don’t think about big stuff that could change your life. You think about small things that might terrify you –like a bad report card or missing a goal in front of all your friends or your friends no longer wanting to play with you. Because that's the biggest stuff you know. The biggest disappointments are all tied to this small little universe of yours, because bigger things cannot fit into a small universe. If you wanted bigger things in there you needed to have more room –or make more room. Perhaps you thought about your parents or your pets dying, which was rare. But all you knew was you would be terribly sad and lonely. And on those occasions when people or pets actually died, someone usually came along and distracted you from feeling too much of your actual feelings. Grownups did that –they never left you alone to feel alone or think alone too much. They tended to think you are too small to know how to think and feel in big heaps, so they took parts of your heap onto themselves. To help – but in the long run –it doesn’t help at all. Because if you do not see, or feel or think, or taste the bitter things in life, you don’t know they exist. You have not seen enough of the world to know how terrible it could be. And unfortunately for Sam, this inability to process change persisted into adulthood.

~ Adelheid Manefeldt

Language, she said, was just our way to explain away the wonder and glory of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss. She said people can't deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it can't be explained and understood.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

The fact that neither of us made sense was the beauty of it.

~ Dominic Riccitello

In the new quiet I heard the sea as if my ears were laid against the ocean floor. I could hear everything. The rumbling earthquake of a ship and spider crabs moving between weeds.

~ Deborah Levy

Dishonesty is not only the destroyer of beauty, but of what beauty creates, even out of ugliness - understanding. Dishonesty is the extinguisher of understanding, and understanding is the foundation of compassion.

~ Gizmo

To understand even remotely the holy omnipotence of God is to understand at least from mostly to wholly the magnificence of Christ.

~ Criss Jami

Beautiful moments in life need no words for description. Living those moments and feeling the beauty suffices.

~ Mamur Mustapha

The aim is to love God because the pure heart loves loving God and because the true mind knows He deserves it. Unlike the accusations and beliefs of the critics and skeptics, it is neither an obligation of duty; nor a fear of damnation; nor a wish for power; nor a desire to appear more righteous than others; nor because God needs it; but because through all love, truth, reason, faith, honesty, and joy in and beyond oneself and the universe, He is worthy.

~ Criss Jami

The spirit is willing but the body is weakLead us then our Savoir that we may not slumberOh Jehovah! Oh Jehovah!Thy strength we beseech to get to the endSo we may render a good account of our arduous journey to the endThe spirit is willing but the body is weakLead us then our Savoir that we may not slumberWell done, good and faithful servants you shall sayUnto they that shall be faithful with a few things in their days.Come and share your Master’s happiness you shall sayUnto they that diligently made their hay in the day.Oh Jehovah! Oh Jehovah! Grant us Thy power to be faithful in our days!The spirit is willing but the body is weak.Lead us then our Savoir that we may not slumber.Certain paths we know seem leading to your throne.But there is only one path to Thy throne we yearn to know;The path of our Lord and Savior Christ Jesus!Come to me all you who grow weary He exclaims!Easy is His yoke; lighter is His burden! Our hearts and minds; our burden!The spirit is willing but the body is weak.Lead us then our Savoir that we may not slumber.The end draws nearer and nearer as we take steps to the end.Many are the things we need to do before we get to the end.But many are the things that take our attention as we journey to the end.A heart of understanding oh Jehovah we beseech;that we may do all things pleasant to Thee with understanding.The spirit is willing but the body is weak.Lead us then our Savoir that we may not slumber.

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Rarely do I truly understand the disease which ails me. Therefore, rarely do I truly understand the fix that would cure me. And so maybe I should truly contemplate how rarely I recognize that God understands both.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Grace is all that God is free to do for you, in you, with you and through you only because of the finished work of Jesus Christ.

~ Kingsley Opuwari Manuel

We can't understand the solutions other people arrive at until we understand the problems they are trying to solve.

~ Brandon J Brown

At the conclusion of all our studies we must try once again to experience the human soul as soul, and not just as a buzz of bioelectricity; the human will as will, and not just a surge of hormones; the human heart not as a fibrous, sticky pump, but as the metaphoric organ of understanding. We need not believe in them as metaphysical entities -- they are as real as the flesh and blood they are made of. But we must believe in them as entities; not as analyzed fragments, but as wholes made real by our contemplation of them, by the words we use to talk of them, by the way we have transmuted them to speech. We must stand in awe of them as unassailable, even though they are dissected before our eyes.

~ Melvin Konner

Always listen to your soul and feel the purity of that moment - no matter how sad or joyful - because it will speak to you further... a healing an understanding, a perspective or more will come out of it. Only because you listened.

~ Angie Karan

I see you better in music, I hear you better in wind, I feel you more in a flooding moonlight, that understands nothing, but darkness and silence.

~ Anthony Liccione

If your heart is conflicted, teach it to be unrestricted.

~ Nikki Rowe

Sometimes, a person isn’t looking to increase their lifestyle, status or ego when they fall in love. Sometimes, they just want that special someone that is just like them. The one person that truly understands how they suffer because they have gone through it too. They want to wake up beside someone that knows their trials intimately. They want a teammate that doesn’t say they get it, but someone who knows it, lived it and survived it. They have been looking for that person their entire life because they feel alone and misunderstood. They are tired of people telling them not to care about other people, when that is not who God designed them to be. The depth of their soul can’t be reached by their partner standing at the top looking down. They want to come home to their “own kind”--the person that has run the same dark corridors they have traveled in their mind. They want to build a life with someone that would never break their heart, push them away or give up on them. They don’t want the person that has to win. They want the rescuer that has been to the fearful boundaries of their heart, but knows the way back to life. When they meet this person they will never forget them because they will come into their life with all the fire they possess and never leave their soul.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Sometimes you just have to step outside the box and take a leap of faith. You may not be able to see what's on the other side, but you can't remain in the same place. Fear is what keeps you there. If you want something badly enough you'll take the steps to get there. If you believe it, then you can achieve it.

~ Amaka Imani Nkosazana

The excellence of the soul is understanding; for the man who understands is conscious, devoted, and already godlike.

~ Hermes Trismegistus

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 physician cannot prescribe it as medicine.

~ Suzy Kassem

Comprehension is the ability to follow an explanation.Understanding is the ability to be able to lead if needed.

~ Cody Edward Lee Miller

Compassion makes you strong, caring and creative. It creates a different attitude, a level of maturity and understanding, where you do something which makes you stand out of crowd.

~ Amit Ray