Understanding Quotes

Everyone hears only what he understands.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?

Philip Roth

And, most important, we have to shift our understanding of ourselves as separate individuals, each seeking our own welfare, to an understanding of how we fit into social, biological, and physical environments.

Robert E. Ornstein

To perceive is to suffer.

Aristotle

To learn to see- to accustom the eye to calmness, to patience, and to allow things to come up to it; to defer judgment, and to acquire the habit of approaching and grasping an individual case from all sides. This is the first preparatory schooling of intellectuality. One must not respond immediately to a stimulus; one must acquire a command of the obstructing and isolating instincts.

Friedrich Nietzsche

she, with her affection and her gaiety, had been largely responsible for him having rediscovered the meaning of life, her love had driven him to the far corners of the Earth, because he needed to be rich enough to buy some land and live in peace with her for the rest of their days. It was his utter confidence in this fragile creature, that had made him fight with honor, because he knew that after a battle he could forget all the horrors of war in her arms, and that, despite all the women he had known, only there in her arms could he close his eyes and sleep like a child.

Paulo Coelho

Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.

Madame Curie

Never explain yourself. Your friend don't need it and your enemies won't believe it.

Source Unknown

The less you know about a subject, the longer it takes you to explain it.

Source Unknown

What we do not understand, we cannot control.

Charles Reich

Before we can forgive one another, we have to understand one another.

Emma Goldman

The motto should not be: Forgive one another; rather understand one another.

Emma Goldman

Nothing can be love or hated unless it is first known.

Leonardo DaVinci

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.

Leonardo DaVinci

It is better to understand a little than to misunderstand a lot.

Anatole France

When a good man is hurt all who would be called good must suffer with him.

Euripides

We never understand how little we need in this world until we know the loss of it.

James Barrie

The borders of my bodyhood coincide with those of my openness to the world. They are in fact at any given time identical, though they are always changing with the fluid expansion and contraction of my relationships to the world.

Medard Boss

A new vision and understanding of something demands a new way of talking about it, for the old terminology gets in the way of this effort. Stubbornly entrenched behind the words coined by a particular conceptual orientation are its secrete prejudices. Any attempt to open out an adequately human vista onto the phenomena of undisturbed existence must include a critique of the most important idea of traditional biology, physiology, and psychology.

Medard Boss

Perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.

Andre Breton