understanding Quotes

“Just because you don’t understand something doesn’t mean that it’s nonsense.”

“To be great is to be misunderstood.”

“Evil is ignorance.”

“Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?”

“Science has its place in man’s search for understanding, but science and the imagination have tended to bifurcate in the modern world; only the true poetic intellect can end this long-established dualism.”

“It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.”

“As a poet and as a mathematician, he would reason well; as a mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all.”

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

“Our identities are always changing and growing, they’re not meant to be pinned down. Our histories are never all good or all bad, and running from the past is the surest way to be defined by it. That’s when it owns us. The key is bringing light to the darkness - developing awareness and understanding.”

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”

“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

“Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

“In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.”

“Several of them would have protested if they could have found the right arguments.”

“I sometimes wonder if anyone will ever understand what I mean, if anyone will ever overlook my ingratitude and not worry about whether or not I’m Jewish and merely see me as a teenager badly in need of some good, plain fun.”

“My words itch at your ears till you understand them”

“I do not know everything; still many things I understand.”

“I don’t understand it any more than you do, but one thing I’ve learned is that you don’t have to understand things for them to be.”

“My heart is heavy with the things that I do not understand.”

“Her hazel eyes seemed to have experienced all possible tragedy and to have mounted pain and suffering like steps into a high calm and a superhuman understanding.”

“And understanding begets empathy and compassion, even for the meanest beggar . . . ”

“Their greatest comfort was a simple one: they were no longer alone. To know that you were with the one who cared for you, and who understood every fiber of your being, and who would not abandon you even in the most desperate of circumstances, that was the most precious relationship a person could have, and they both cherished it.”

″[Y]ou must strive to be calm, even if a hundred ravening enemies are snapping at your heels. Empty your mind and allow it to become like a tranquil pool that reflects everything around it and yet remains untouched by its surroundings. Understanding will come to you in that emptiness, when you are free of irrational fears about victory and defeat, life and death.”

“The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand.”

As I ate she began the first of what we later called “my lessons in living.” She said that I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and even more intelligent than college professors. She encouraged me to listen carefully to what country people called mother wit. That in those homely sayings was couched the collective wisdom of generations.

“His ear heard more than was said to him, and his slow speech had overtones not of thought, but of understanding beyond thought.”

“Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other.”

“Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot? But there are things old and new which must not be contemplate by men´s eyes, because they know -or think they know- some things which other men have told them. Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.”

“To understand is to forgive.”

“Love. Why I don’t like the word is that it means too much to me, far more than you can understand,” and she glanced into his face. ‘Au revoir!‘”

“She said nothing, and Sir Andrew too was silent, yet those two young people understood one another, as young people have a way of doing all the world over, and have done since the world began.”

“How can I make him understand that he did not create me? He makes the same mistake as the others when they look at a feeble-minded person and laugh because they don’t understand there are human feelings involved.”

“If you want sense, you’ll have to make it yourself.”

I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.

“People tend 2 choke that which they do not understand”

“Don’t worry about the bits you can’t understand. Sit back and allow the words to wash around you, like music.”

“The first opinion which one forms of a prince, and of his understanding, is by observing the men he has around him.”

“Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

You can love completely without complete understanding.

“Most of them had not understood Blackberry’s discovery of the raft and at once forgot it. Fiver, however, came over to where Blackberry was lying against the stem of a blackthorn in the hedge. “You saved Pipkin and me, didn’t you?” he said. “I don’t think Pipkin’s got any idea what really happened; but I have.” “I admit it was a good idea,” replied Blackberry. “Let’s remember it. It might come in handy again sometime.”″

“I’m much better at interpreting books and stories than I am at understanding the decisions made by living, breathing people.”

“Really, though, what do I know about what another person is capable of? I still don’t have a clue what I’m capable of. I keep surprising even myself.”

“He knows the ‘why’ for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any ‘how.‘”

“A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life.”

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

“Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them. They move away. The moments that used to define them—a mother’s approval, a father’s nod—are covered by moments of their own accomplishments. It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives.”

“Just as we are on the verge of really understanding something, allowing our heart to truly open, just as we have the opportunity to see clearly, we put on a Groucho Marx mask with fluffy eyebrows and a big nose. Then we refuse to laugh or let go, because we might discover who knows what?″

“This is the greatest gift God can give you: to understand what happened in your life. To have it explained. It is the peace you have been searching for.”

“There are five people you meet in heaven. Each of us was in your life for a reason. You may not have known the reason at the time, and that is what heaven is for. For understanding your life on earth.”

“That’s what heaven is. You get to make sense of your yesterdays.”

“I wound up reading and rereading her parts, wondering when in the world she started thinking like that. I mean, no kidding, Juli Baker’s smart, but this was something way beyond straight A’s. A month ago if I’d read this article, I would have chucked it in the trash as complete garbage, but for some reason it made sense to me now. A lot of sense. A month ago I also wouldn’t have paid any attention to the picture of Juli, but now I found myself staring at it.”

“I want people to know what it feels like to nearly give up on yourself and why you might do it. I want people to understand what happens in the life of the poor and the psychological impact that spiritual and material poverty has on their children. I want people to understand the American Dream as my family encountered it. I want people to understand how upward mobility really feels. And I want people to understand something I learned only recently: that for those of us lucky enough to live the American Dream, the demons of the life we left behind continue to chase us.”

“And Isi always listened, never told Enna she had been foolish, never said hollow things like ‘You’ll be all right.’ . . . Isi saw Enna’s struggle and her sadness, and she understood.”

“Look with your understanding, find out what you already know, and you’ll see the way to fly.”

“Look at Fletcher! Lowell! Charles-Roland! Judy Lee! Are they also special and gifted and divine? No more than you are, no more than I am. The only difference, the very only one, is that they have begun to understand what they really are and have begun to practice it.”

“Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone.”

“A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.”

″...there were a million little lines of shading that we couldn’t convey so easily. They were the subtle things, and understanding them, even knowing when you missed them, was what separated other friends from real friends, like we were.”

“Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense, But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.”

“And Edmund for the first time in this story felt sorry for someone besides himself. It seemed so pitiful to think of those little stone figures sitting there all the silent days and all the dark nights, year after year, till the moss grew on them and at last even their faces crumbled away.”

“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.”

″To relate effectively with a wife, a husband, children, friends, or working associates, we must learn to listen. And this requires emotional strength. Listening involves patience, openness, and the desire to understand -- highly developed qualities of character. It’s so much easier to operate from a low emotional level and to give high-level advice.″

“I realized that today I truly understood my purpose as Ellie: not just to Find people but to save them.

“I understood it now, why I had lived so many times. I had to learn a lot of important skills and lessons, so that when the time came I could rescue Ethan, not from the pond but from the sinking despair of his own life.”

″‘No!’ Mom or Ethan would shout when I wet the floor. ‘Good boy!’ they’d sing when I peed in the grass. ‘Okay, that’s good,’ they’d say when I urinated on the papers. I could not understand what in the world was wrong with them.”

“Finding someone you love and loves you back is a wonderful feeling. But finding a true soulmate is an even better feeling. A soulmate is someone who understands you like no other will be there for you forever no matter what.”

“You can’t understand most of the important things from a distance, Bryan. You have to get close.”

“She had the feeling that somehow, in the very far-off places, perhaps even in far-off ages, there would be a meaning found to all sorrow and an answer too fair and wonderful to be as yet understood.”

“If we would indeed know God in growing intimacy we must go this way of renunciation.”

“Hunger makes thief of any man.”

“I don’t have to remember nothing. I don’t even have to explain. She understands it all...”

“It’s easy to talk to a horse if you understand his language. Horses stay the same from the day they are born until the day they die. They are only changed by the way people treat them.”

“Men argue for the right to be free while women argue for the right to be upset. Men want space while women want understanding.”

“When we are staggered by the chilly winds of adversity and battered by the raging storms of disappointment and when through our folly and sin we stray into some destructive far country and are frustrated because of the strange feeling of homesickness, we need to know that there is Someone who loves us, cares for us, understands us, and will give us another chance.”

“She said, ‘There’s nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.’ ”

“One of the greatest days of my life was when I came to understand that other people’s approval and my happiness were not related.”

“There ain’t no way you can hold on to something that wants to go, you understand? You can only love what you got while you got it.”

“Is there a lot of stuff you don’t understand? she said & I said pretty much the whole thing & she nodded & said that’s what she thought, but it was nice to hear it anyways and we sat there on the porch swing, listening to the wind & growing up together.”

“To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole.”

“How will I teach this mind what it is to have a soul? How will I teach this mind to understand pain? How will I teach it to want to take on another person’s suffering?”

“Winn-Dixie looked straight at me when I said that to him, like he was feeling relieved to finally have somebody understand his situation. I nodded my head at him and went on talking.”

“The explanations a writer gives himself for having written any particular book are more often not the real reasons why that book has been written. Honesty is not the issue. Understanding is. A man does not write one novel at a time or even one quatrain at a time. He is engaged in the long process of putting his whole life on paper. He is on a journey and he is reporting in: ‘This is where I think I am and this is what this place looks like today.’”

“That old saw about ‘to understand all is to forgive all’ is a lot of tripe. Some things, the more you understand the more you loathe them.”

“I had failed to understand the perverse comfort we sometimes get from choosing death in life, exempting ourselves from the challenge of using our gifts, of living our lives in authentic relationship with others.”

“Marylou was the only girl Dean ever really loved. He was sick with regret when he saw her face again, and, as of yore, he pleaded and begged at her knees for the joy of her being. She understood Dean; she stroked his hair; she knew he was mad.”

“He’d discovered that he liked houses. Maybe mostly because they were understandable... Houses were fair, they gave you what you deserved. Which, unfortunately, was more than one could say about people.”

“Our lives are lived well only when they are lived on the terms of their creation, with God loving and us being loved, with God making and us being made, with God revealing and us understanding, with God commanding and us responding.”

“Lindner: …most of the trouble exists because people just don’t sit down and talk to each other…That we don’t try hard enough in this world to understand the other fellow’s problem. The other guy’s point of view.”

“And there, on the golden gravel of the bed of the stream, lay King Caspian, dead, with the water flowing over him like liquid glass […] And all three stood and wept. Even the Lion wept: great Lion-tears, each tear more precious than the Earth would be if it was a single solid diamond. And Jill noticed that Eustace looked neither like a child crying, nor like a boy crying and wanting to hide it, but like a grown-up crying.”

“During this act of friendship, the two young men exchanged looks of intelligence, which caused Duncan to forget the character and condition of his wild associate.”

“You will never understand the meaning of actual reality.”

“But when Scrubb shook hands with Jill, he said, ‘So long, Jill. Sorry I’ve been a funk and so ratty. I hope you get safe home,’ and Jill said, ‘So long, Eustace. And I’m sorry I’ve been such a pig.’ And this was the first time they had ever used Christian names, because one didn’t do it at school.”

“Suddenly those stares made sense. My intentions didn’t matter. They didn’t know I didn’t want this. In their eyes, I was a threat. And I could see they wanted me gone.”

“None of us are going to leave this island. That’s the plan. You know it, of course, perfectly. What, perhaps, you can’t understand is the relief!”

“As a matter of fact I do know the answer—the reason Johnny Tremain got mad and hateful is because he burned his hand in a stupid accident—and I know about that because Freak has been showing me how to read a whole book and for some reason it all makes sense, where before it was just a bunch of words I didn’t care about.”

“Your business and your life will change when you really, really get it that some people are not going to change, no matter what you do, and that still others have a vested interest in being destructive.”

“She had grown older. And he loved her more now than he had loved her when he understood her better, when she was the product of her parents. What she was now was what she herself had decided to become.”

“You must understand: they fear you. There is nothing scarier in their minds than a girl who knows the power of her flames.”

“He finally understood that God’s presence was everywhere, at all times, and was experienced by everyone at one time or another.”

“Faith is universal. Our specific methods for understanding it are arbitrary. Some of us pray to Jesus, some of us go to Mecca, some of us study subatomic particles. In the end we are all just searching for truth, that which is greater than ourselves.”

“When Nath had been born, then Lydia, Marilyn had not informed her mother, had not even sent a photograph. What was there to say? She and James had never discussed what her mother had said about their marriage that last day: it’s not right. She had not ever wanted to think of it again. So when James came home that night, she said simply, “My mother died.” Then she turned back to the stove and added, “And the lawn needs mowing,” and he understood: they would not talk about it.”

“I could see an old and beautiful olive tree just up ahead. ”

″‘I don’t understand,’ he said again, ‘You tell people about the kingdom. Are we not to fight for it?’ ‘The kingdom is only bought at a great price,’ Jesus said. ‘There was one who came just yesterday and wanted to follow me. He was very rich, and when I asked him to give up his wealth, he went away.’

“The sky held scattered clouds; at that instant the sun came out from behind one and a shaft of light hit him. His clothes vanished. He stood before them, a golden youth, clothed only in beauty—beauty that made Jubal’s heart ache, thinking that Michelangelo in his ancient years would have climbed down from his high scaffolding to record it for generations unborn. Mike said gently, ‘Look at me. I am a son of man.‘”

″‘Uh-oh, hitting’s not allowed.’ […] ‘Actually, boxing… it’s nasty but it’s a game, it’s kind of allowed if they have those special gloves on.‘”

“Understanding comes with life.”

“Anyone who couldn’t understand that what’s important is a man’s soul, not the color of his skin, would never be content here.”

“You are innocent until you understand.”

“The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are.”

“No medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what its dangers are.”

″‘Yes, Jubal. You—’ Smith stopped, looked embarrassed. ‘I again have not words. I will read and read and read, until I find words. Then I will teach my brother.‘”

“It was not possible to separate in the Martian tongue the human concepts: ‘religion,’ ‘philosophy,’ and ‘science’—and, since Mike thought in Martian, it was not possible for him to tell them apart.”

“Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.”

“[…] let yourself go. You are inclined to get muddled, if I may judge from last night. Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.”

“When I saw him many things I thought I had forgotten came flooding back to me. This was because I had begun, finally, to wonder about Sonny, about the life that Sonny lived inside.”

“‘Rabbit’s clever,’ said Pooh thoughtfully. ‘Yes,’ said Piglet, ‘Rabbit’s clever.’ ‘And he has Brain.’ ‘Yes,’ said Piglet, ‘Rabbit has Brain.’ There was a long silence. ‘I suppose,’ said Pooh, ‘that that’s why he never understands anything.‘”

“The truth can’t be stated in English any more than Beethoven’s Fifth can be.”

“I understood what innocent intent had brought me to, and ... waded out beyond my depth.”

“For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You’ll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you’ll realize it’s always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won’t understand why or how. You’ll have forgotten what granted you this awareness in the first place

″‘... it’s not enough to know what the future ​is. You have to know what it means.‘”

“Worse, you’ll realize it’s always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won’t understand why or how.”

“For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You’ll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you’ll realize it’s always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won’t understand why or how.”

″‘Oh, it wasn’t him!’ Mrs. Grose with emphasis declared. ‘It was Quint’s own fancy. To play with him, I mean—to spoil him.’ She paused a moment; then she added: ‘Quint was much too free.’ This gave me, straight from my vision of his face—such a face!—a sudden sickness of disgust. ‘Too free with my boy?’ ‘Too free with everyone!‘”

“I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality I knew was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake.”

“The word “time” split its husk; poured its riches over him; and from his lips fell like shells, like shavings from a plane, without his making them, hard, white, imperishable words, and flew to attach themselves to their places in an ode to Time; an immortal ode to Time.”

“Hold close to your essential self. Get to know it, the way you get to know everything in the world about someone you’re in love with, the way you know your child, their every freckle and preference and which cry means what.”

“The scales fell from Lucy’s eyes. How had she stood Cecil for a moment? He was absolutely intolerable, and the same evening she broke off her engagement.”

“She could not understand him; the words were indeed remote. Yet as he spoke the darkness was withdrawn, veil after veil, and she saw to the bottom of her soul.”

“Tho why after three weeks of perfect happy peace and adjustment in these strange woods my soul so went down the drain when I came back with Dave Wain and Romana and my girl Billie and her kid, I’ll never know -- Worth the telling only if I dig deep into everything.”

“If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?”

“You never understood, why we did this. The audience knows the truth: the world is simple. It’s miserable, solid all the way through. But if you could fool them, even for a second, then you can make them wonder, and then you... then you got to see something really special... you really don’t know?... it was... it was the look on their faces..”.

“I’m very good at the past. It’s the present I can’t understand.”

“They stared at each other in the flickering light, realized what this meant. There was no tunnel leading out of Ember. The way out was the river. To leave Ember, they must go on the river.”

“Smart people instinctively understand the dangers of entrusting our future to self-serving leaders who use our institutions, whether in the corporate or social sectors, to advance their own interests.”

“It is a mistake to put forth effort and obtain some understanding and then stop at that.”

“I know she’s not upset that I bought new clothes. She’s upset that I didn’t ask her opinion and bought them in colors that she didn’t expect. She’s upset with the change she didn’t see coming. I resent and understand it at the same time.”

“No man, one sees, can understand and estimate the entire structure or its parts – what are its frailties and what its repairs, without knowing the nature of the materials.”

“Trump came to believe he understood everything about the media—who you need to know, what pretense you need to maintain, what information you could profitably trade, what lies you might tell, what lies the media expected you to tell. ”

″For Jessica, it was easier to think of me as Bad Hannah than as the Hannah she got to know at Monet’s. It was easier to accept. Easier to understand. For her, the rumors needed to be true.”

“With every side of every tape, an old memory gets turned upside down. A reputation twists into something I don’t recognize.”

“Dust is only a name for what happens when matter begins to understand itself.”

“It is also broad enough to include an understanding of systemic institutionalized sexism. As a definition it is open-ended. To understand feminism it implies one has to necessarily understand sexism.”

“I’d finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to find was a way in.”

“Everything can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you want them to understand.”

“People may guess or frame a supposition, But I can say for certain, it’s no lie, God bade us all to wax and multiply. That kindly text I well can understand.”

“I am black; I am in total fusion with the world, in sympathetic affinity with the earth, losing my id in the heart of the cosmos -- and the white man, however intelligent he may be, is incapable of understanding Louis Armstrong or songs from the Congo. ”

“Don’t you get it yet? The minute we decide that one person doesn’t matter anymore, they’ve won.”

“Rhetoric is the counterpart of Dialectic. Both alike are concerned with such things as come, more or less, within the general ken of all men and belong to no definite science.”

“Fools of little understanding have themselves for their greatest enemies, for they do evil deeds which must bear bitter fruits.”

“In any case, he seemed to think I knew exactly what he meant, and I realized, with some irritation, that I didn’t dare say anything just then, for fear of disappointing him.”

“To understand Russia, to understand Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Boston, identity politics, Sri Lanka, and Life Savers, you have to be on top of this hill.”

“We are all very anxious to be understood, and it is very hard not to be. But there is one thing much more necessary.′ ‘What is that, grandmother?’ ‘To understand other people.‘”

“The person who understands the evil in his own heart is the only person who is useful, fruitful, and solid in his beliefs and obedience. ”

“In all my years in the streets, I’d been looking at the exploitation that for the first time I really saw and understood.”

“I love you in a language that I don’t fully understand. In words that I haven’t found enough courage to forklift out of my chest.”

“The soul of these books was a new understanding of Christianity, their direct consequence a new understanding of art.”

“I’m, being the girls’ mother, should understand them more than anyone. But that’s what’s so frightening. I don’t know. Once they’re out of you, they’re different, kids are. Leaving their home, they will become another’s.”

“I can understand how the limited perspective of an unartificial mind might perceive it that way. You’ll get used to it.”

″You don’t know what goes on in anyone’s life but your own. And when you mess with one part of a person’s life, you’re not messing with just that part. Unfortunately, you can’t be that precise and selective. When you mess with one part of a person’s life, you’re messing with their entire life. Everything...affects everything.”

“I can no more understand the totality of God than the pancake I made for breakfast understands the complexity of me.”

“A calm came over Lito, as though he’d come to some sort of understanding, some decision. ‘I see if now, Chabela. All of it. The past, the present, the future. All my life, I kept waiting for things to get better. Fro the bright promise of manana. But a funny thing happened while I was waiting for the world to change, Chabela: It didn’t. Because I didn’t change it. I’m not going to make the same mistake twice.‘”

“In wretched little lives like that, someone must intervene. Or at least mark their sad comings and goings. Mark and if possible permanently record, so they’ll be remembered. For a better day, later on, when people will understand.”

“Do you think I don’t understand economics? How many times do I have to explain . . . Fascist economics are immune from the cyclic disturbances of capitalism?”

“When I ran my space ship into the chrono-synclastic infundibulum, it came to me in a flash that everything that has been always will be, and everything that ever will be always has been.” He chuckled again. “Knowing that rather takes the glamour out of fortunetelling—makes it the simplest, most obvious thing imaginable.”

“We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”

“The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.”

“We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”

“We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine.”

“The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what’s true.”

“Love is something else entirely. It is caring. It is arguing with curiosity—It is giving an inch when the other seems certainly wrong—it is teasing, it is empathy, it is respect, it is a moment of quiet smiling admiration each morning.”

“Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.”

“We hunger to understand, so we invent myths about how we imagine the world is constructed – and they’re, of course, based upon what we know, which is ourselves and other animals. So we make up stories about how the world was hatched from a cosmic egg or created after the mating of cosmic deities or by some fiat of a powerful being.”

“The lips of wisdom are closed, except to the ears of Understanding”

“He who understands the Principle of Vibration, has grasped the scepter of power.”

“In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.”

“‘Make it go away,’ I said, and he laughed. ‘You humans are truly grateful creatures, aren’t you?‘”

“Yet, what a real living human being is made of seems to be less understood today than at any time before, and men–each one of whom represents a unique and valuable experiment on part of nature–are therefore shot wholesale nowadays.”

″‘We live in America,’ he said. ‘Everyone who speaks English understands you. How they interpret you is something else.‘”

“Ye cannot fully understand the relations of choice and Time till you are beyond both.”

“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.”

“It is from understanding that power comes; and the power in the ceremony was in understanding what it meant; for nothing can live well except in a manner that is suited to the way the sacred Power of the World lives and moves.”

“You’ll understand when you’ve forgotten what you understood before.”

“The whole difficulty of understanding Hell is that the thing to be understood is so nearly nothing.”

“Each of us has lived through some devastation, some loneliness, some weather superstorm or spiritual superstorm. When we look at each other we must say, I understand. I understand how you feel because I have been there myself. We must support each other because each of us is more alike then we are unalike. ”

“We have said that primary science is the science of these things in so far as they, its subjects, are things that are, and not in regard to any other feature. Hence both physics and mathematics are to be considered mere parts of total understanding.”

“Are physicists and biologists willing to believe in anything so long as it is not religious thought? Close enough. Has rationalism and moral thought provided us with an understanding of what is good, what is right, and what is moral? Not close enough. Has secularism in the terrible 20th century been a force for good? Not even close, to being close.”

“The ego isn’t wrong, it is just unconscious. When you observe the ego in yourself, you are beginning to go beyond it. Don’t take the ego too seriously...Above all, know that the ego isn’t personal. It isn’t who you are. ”

“It would get weirder, I knew that, and it would take time until we all understood this new world of ours.”

“I done me best when I was let. Thinking always if I go all goes. A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me? One in a thousand of years of the nights? All me life I have been lived among them but now they are becoming lothed to me.”

“She began to understand why lovers talk baby talk to one another. There was no other socially acceptable circumstance in which the children inside her were permitted to come out. ”

“Anything you don’t understand, you attribute to God. God for you is where you sweep away all the mysteries of the world, all the challenges to our intelligence. You simply turn your mind off and say God did it.”

“Do you ever think that people who find it tougher to say what they’re feeling are the ones who feel things more intensely? As if they’re the ones who really understand what it means to love someone? As if they have to keep their defenses high, because they care too much and have too much to lose?”

“His relationship also felt sacred because he had just recently…felt he had gotten the rhythm of it. The person he thought he knew had turned out to be, in some ways, not the person before him, and it had taken him time to figure out how many facets he had yet to see: it was as if the shape he had all along thought was a pentagram was in reality a dodecahedron, many sided and many fractaled and much more complicated to measure.”

“Wasn’t this what he had wanted…from this relationship? To be so indispensable to another person that that person couldn’t even comprehend his life without him? And now he had it, and the demands of the position terrified him. He had asked for responsibility without understanding completely how much damage he could do. Was he able to do this?”

“You swore you loved me, and laughed and warned me that you would not love me forever. I did not hear you. You were speaking in a language I did not understand.”

“She looked at him bravely now for the first time, at his face, the face from which a child had fled, and drew breath. She rose. Her eyes filled. She knew.”

“When you find a writer who really is saying something to you, read everything that writer has written and you will get more education and depth of understanding out of that than reading a scrap here and a scrap there and elsewhere. Then go to people who influenced that writer, or those who were related to him, and your world builds together in an organic way that is really marvelous.”

“I get it,” said Michael. “Maybe good luck and bad luck are all mixed up. You never know what will happen next.”

This wonderful story expresses through words that people can recover from painful comings and goings as long as they have the help of their friends and family and other loved ones.

Equating willfulness with being special, the child then confronts other themes of life such as eternity and loneliness. The cat declares that he is immortal. The girl concludes that they are both willful. As the girl identifies with the cat they discuss some of life’s themes. Loneliness is seen in the mailman and dog. The girl attempts to show empathy, but the cat will have none of that. He does not show compassion and is irritated that the girl will not follow his lead in being pitiless.

“just as I was maturing in my own understanding, she, too, was moving closer and closer to that point where she was in the right place at the right time, with the right understanding to accomplish the task that had been assigned to her. In this respect there is no doubt in my mind that she had always been the right person”

“The Winter of the Dog is a winter Joel will never forget. It’s then that he begins to understand that he’s himself, and nobody else. But he grows up, he grows older, he becomes thirteen.”

Simon even somewhat coming to terms, even being able to fathom a bit why his father abandoned the family, why fatherhood was so traumatic an experience for him and to him that he left, that he ran away.

“Together, words and pictures reveal how respect for others can be the first step toward true friendship and real understanding. And, as any good fable should, it does it all without preaching its moral or losing its sense of humor.”

“Uhm,′ muttered a voice up in the birch. – Are you a real owl? Asks the duck. – Uhm. ‘Come down here,’ the duck shouted.”

“I don’t understand what you mean,′ said the owl. – I always sleep during the day. ‘That’s weird,’ said the duck. – At night you sleep. – Sleep at night, you say? No way! The night is too exciting to be spent sleeping. It’s when it’s dark, it’s when your eyes get wide, and you expect something to eat.”

“But, Stanley,′ said Rhoda, ‘where should I begin.’ ‘Wy don’t you start by taking the beads out of your modeling clay?’ suggested Stanley. ‘They’re betties, not beads,’ said Rhoda.”

“Annad could not imagine the valley without the village. But Roawn could. Reading the old stories in the house of books, listening half asleep to Timon under the teaching tree, and most of all, sitting on the grass by the stream while the bukshah grazed around him in the silence of the morning, he had often imagined this place as the first settler must have seen it.”

“The thing about Shakespeare is, he’s so eloquent…He speaks the unspeakable. He turns grief and triumph and rapture and rage into words, into something we can understand. He renders the whole mystery of humanity comprehensible.”

“I think it’s easy to mistake understanding for empathy - we want empathy so badly. Maybe learning to make that distinction is part of growing up. It’s hard and ugly to know somebody can understand you without even liking you.”

“Every evening, after dinner, Noah said to Happy, ‘Hello, Happy.’ He said many, many, MANY times. Each time Happy just looked at Noah and wagged his tail.”

“From the moment he’s left as a foundling in a lambing-pen on Outoverdown Farm, Spider Sparrow is surrounded by animals. Adopted by the kindly shepherd and his wife, Spider has comes to know all the animals on the farm, including the crows he must scare away from the newly sown wheat.”

“Fifteen-year-old Jess’s grandfather has just had a major heart attack, but he insists he finish his painting, River Boy. At first, Jess cannot understand why this painting is so important to her grandfather, especially since there doesn’t seem to be any boy in it at all. But while swimming in the river herself, Jess begins to feel the presence of a strange boy. Could this be the same one her ailing grandfather struggles to paint? And if so, why has he returned?”

“So what’s wrong if there happens to be one guy in the world who enjoys trying to understand you?”

“With Albert riding me, there was no hanging on the reins, no jerking on the bit in my mouth; a gentle squeeze with the knees and a touch with his heels was enough to tell me what he wanted of me. I think he could have ridden even without that, so well did we come to understand each other.”

“His mind and heart were flooded with extraordinary light; all torment, all doubt, all anxieties were relieved at once, resolved in a kind of lofty calm, full of serene, harmonious joy and hope, full of understanding and the knowledge of the ultimate cause of things.”

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

“Today we are now thrown into contact all the time with people whose assumptions, perspectives, and backgrounds are different from our own. The modern world is not two brothers feuding for control of the Ottoman Empire. It is Cortés and Montezuma struggling to understanding each other through multiple layers of translators.”

“I feel satisfied now that each of us fully understands what is in the mind of the other.”

“She hates hockey but understands her father’s love for it; the sport is just a different instrument from hers.”

“Instead of understanding that they were the beneficiaries of history, they began to believe that they were the creators of it.”

“until you become completely obsessed with your mission, no one will take you seriously. Until the world understands that you’re not going away—that you are 100 percent committed and have complete and utter conviction and will persist in pursuing your project—you will not get the attention you need and the support you want.”

“Kaseem, Parvana replied, giving him her boy-name. She didn’t think any more about whether to trust someone with the truth about herself. The truth could get her arrested, or killed. It was easier and safer not to trust anyone.”

“Sometimes you start thinking about death... and you might think death is a big mystery. It is hard to understand what death is... not only when you’re little, but when you’re big, too....”

“The journey down the Amazon was one that Maia never forgot. In places the river was so wide that they sailed between distant lines of tree and Maia understood why it was called the river sea.”

“Mental toughness is possessing, understanding, and being able to utilize a set of psychological skills that allow the effective, and even maximal execution or adaptation, and persistence of decision-making and physical and tactical skills learned in training and by experience.”

“And Father said, ‘Christopher, do you understand that I love you?‘”

“There it is again. Suddenly he understands. There’s a monster under the bed, a huge, wild monster. He’s afraid to look. But he doesn’t have to. Alfie knows it’s there.”

“Pedro does not understand why the adults are so interested in listening to the radio, and goes on with his daily life, going to school and playing soccer with his friends. ”

“I was seeing something I didn’t understand and did not want to. No I wasn’t. I was seeing something I had always understood and wanted to understand better.”

“That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way.”

The two quickly become friends, and through this friendship Prietita comes to see the vast differences between her life and that of Joaquin’s, and the challenges that come with being labeled as an illegal from across the border.

“There, standing by the hole and peering curiously at one of the meatballs, was the smallest owl that he had ever seen. Mullet Fingers chucked him gently on the shoulder. ‘Okay—now do you get it?’ ‘Yeah,’ said Roy. ‘I get it.‘”

“Your gardeners do not understand their business: but what can you expect of men whose fathers were cobblers and carpenters? How should they have learned to cultivate your garden?”

“The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding, or better at explaining than doing.”

“The silence between us hung heavy with all the things we couldn’t say. All the things we knew without them being said out loud.”

“Johnny lay with his eyes closed. Ma didn’t understand. Maybe she though he was lazy. Maybe she couldn’t feel the need that he had, the need to learn. He’d been to school for years now and he’d tried, he really had, but there were many children and no enough teachers; not enough books.”

“It could be that God has not absconded but spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem.”

“No one deserves you like I do.” … “No one sees you like I do.” … “No one understand you the way I do.” … “No one makes your heart beat like I do.” … He presses his palm against my heart. “And no one else deserves to be inside you if they can’t get there here first.”

“If you get to like them and understand them, if you are kind to them and don’t scratch their paint or bang their doors, if you fill them up when they need it, if you keep them clean and polished and out of the rain and snow as much as possible, you will find, you may find, that they become almost like persons- more than just ordinary persons: magical persons!”

“Laura Fielder’s hair is so short she looks just like a boy; she doesn’t give Jenny lavish presents; she doesn’t live in a fancy house. But gradually Jenny learns that Laura has more to give than just presents and cookies.”

“Now he understood. This was death. Death was a silence that gave back no answer.”

“We talk to kids a lot about how to be friends to others, but not much about how to be friends to themselves.”

“With tact and understanding the old boy guides the young one to the conclusion that Siegfried was not a hero...”

“Understand at last that you have something in you more powerful and divine than what causes the bodily passions and pulls you like a mere puppet. What thoughts now occupy my mind? Is it not fear, suspicion, desire, or something like that?”

“I learned to read carefully and not be satisfied with a rough understanding of the whole, and not to agree too quickly with those who have a lot to say about something.”

“A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are.”

“Understand, by saying God, I am merely using God as reference to long-term pattern we can’t decipher. Huge, slow-moving weather system rolling in on us from afar, blowing us randomly.”

“He tilted his head and watched me, unspeaking. He didn’t need to point out that both times I’d visited this town, I’d come without a mother.”

“Dogs can never speak the language of humans, and humans can never speak the language of dogs. But many dogs can understand almost every word humans say, while humans seldom learn to recognize more than half a dozen barks, if that.”