Understanding Quotes

Learn to see what you are looking at.

~ Christopher Paolini

I’m smart in some ways- pretty good vocabulary, solid at math – but I am definitely the stupidest smart person there is… I was going to be the worst friend in the history of dying girls… Because I don’t really have a moral compass and I need to rely on (Earl) for guidance, or else I might accidentally become like a hermit or a terrorist or something. How fucked up is that.

~ Jesse Andrews

There is no simple explanation for anything important any of us do, and the human tragedy, or the human irony, consists in the necessity of living with the consequences of actions performed under the pressure of compulsions so obscure we do not and cannot understand them.

~ Hugh Maclennan

To realize that you do not understand is a virtue, not to realize that you do not understand is a defect.

~ Lao Tzu

One reason we rush so quickly to the vulgar satisfactions of judgment, and love to revel in our righteous outrage, is that it spares us from the impotent pain of empathy, and the harder, messier work of understanding.

~ Tim Kreider

No one could possibly understand my purest feelings but I couldn't care less, My deepest yearnings are nobody's goddamn business anyway

~ Novala Takemoto

If you follow the classical pattern, you are understanding the routine, the tradition, the shadow -- you are not understanding yourself.

~ Bruce Lee

When it comes to the crusty behavior of some people, give them the benefit of the doubt. They may be drowning right before your eyes, but you can't see it. And you would never ask someone to drown with a smile on his face.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Sometimes you can only understand why things happen when you see them in the rearview mirror.

~ Ron Hall

What dooms our best efforts to cultivate empathy and compassion is always, of course, other people.

~ Tim Kreider

I asked her if she believed you could ever truly understand another culture. I told her the longer I stayed, the more asinine the attempt seemed, and that what I’d become more interested in is how we believed we could be objective in any way at all, we who each came in with our own personal definitions of kindness, strength, masculinity, femininity, God, civilisation, right and wrong.

~ Lily King

As I say, I have never in all these years thought of the matter in quite this way; but then it is perhaps in the nature of coming away on a trip such as this that one is prompted towards such surprising new perspectives on topics one imagined one had long ago thought throughly.

~ Kazuo Ishiguro

You don't have to own something for it to be you. Haven't you ever gone into a gallery and seen a painting and said 'that's me'. Or had a piece of music capture something deep down you didn't even know was there? You realize it's always been part of youl you've just never heard it before.

~ James L. Rubart

My brother, he says. My brother is dead.And again he asks me to kill him. One more time before he falls to his knees and sobs. And i get it. I do. Because i have a brother too.

~ Dana Reinhardt

Simplicity is a bliss that makes one comprehend.

~ Criss Jami

As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good—I use it because I have to, but I don’t put any trust in it. We never understand each other.

~ Marcel Duchamp

Nothing changes until people decide to do the things they must, in order to bring about peace.

~ Shannon L. Alder

I would like to believe he's sick rather than just mean and evil.

~ Charles B. Rangel

It's by understanding me, and the boys, and mother, that you have helped me. I expect that is the only way one person ever really can help another.

~ Willa Cather

A perfect love is not all about devotion and loyalty, it is understanding little tiny things.

~ M.f. Moonzajer

Whence then come my errors? They come from the sole fact that since the will is much wider in its range and compass than the understanding, I do not restrain it within the same bounds, but extend it also to things which I do not understand: and as the will is of itself indifferent to these, it easily falls into error and sin, and chooses the evil for the good, or the false for the true.

~ René Descartes

After all, everyone may not start with the same financial opportunities; however everyone does start with the choice to live their life with integrity, trust, love, respect,understanding for each other and oneself.

~ Tasha Hoggatt

Barbarus hic ego sum, quia non intelligor illis.(In this place I am a barbarian, because men do not understand me.)

~ Ovid

This isn't the kind of story where understanding makes you smart, or not understanding makes you dumb.

~ Clamp

By understanding the nuances of the world around you and how to survive the temptations, you can rule anything. Even yourself

~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

The truth is that personality inevitably bleeds into all forms of our intellectual life. We all extrapolate from our own lives in order to understand the world.

~ Siri Hustvedt

Do you know what the difference is between knowing a bird and knowing about a bird?

~ Lionel Suggs

I would say that introverts make some of the best international philosophers. The less common attribute of the introverted lifestyle - a close societal connection, as such a connection disappears or changes in relevance as the currents of the winds change - leaves too much room for one's own cultural bias. Instead, introverts tend to turn inward, the laboratory of being and all its forms. This is the most accurate study of the individual human being, which is in turn, rather than those affected by cultural limitations, the most universal reflection of human understanding and human behavior.

~ Criss Jami

The human understanding is no dry light, but receives infusion from the will and affections; whence proceeds sciences which may be called sciences as one would. For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes. Therefore he rejects difficult things from impatience of research; sober things, because they narrow hope; the deeper things of nature, from supersition; the light of experience, from arrogrance and pride; things not commonly believed, out of deference to the opinion of the vulgar. Numberless in short are the ways, and sometimes imperceptible, in which the affections color and infect the understanding.1620 - Francis Bacon

~ Carl Sagan

Was it all put into words, or did both understand that they had the same thing at heart and in their minds, so that there was no need to speak of it aloud, and better not to speak of it?

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life.

~ W.g. Sebald

It's not about having things figured out, or about communicating with other people, trying to make them understand what you understand. It's about a chicken dinner at a drive-in. A soft pillow. Things that don't need explaining.

~ Ann Beattie

I believe it was the great ogre philosopher Gary who observed that complexity is, generally speaking, an illusion of conscious desire. All things exist in as simple a form as necessity dictates. When a thing is labeled 'complex,' that's just a roundabout way of saying you're not observant enough to understand it.

~ A. Lee Martinez

The great soul understands the small-minded.

~ Toba Beta

Thank you, Tempest, for loving me when understanding was too hard. Thank you for understanding when loving me is impossible.

~ Tracy Deebs

But if we are to remain a great empire, we must have a greater understanding of the hearts and minds of others.

~ Libba Bray

And without understanding, could each properly love the other?

~ Anita Brookner

It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them.

~ Pierre-Augustin Caron De Beaumarchais

I really had no idea you'd be this stupid but then again you were the only person that really got me

~ Novala Takemoto

I have wanted you to see out of my eyes so many times.

~ Elizabeth Berg