#understand

He was no lover in a worldly sense; the only love he knew was that of divine understanding, of taking a whole life into its depths as if they were his own. From this, the greatest pain, the greatest happiness is born: the hope that we too will one day be understood, strangers will accept our words, our lives, as if they were their own. ↗

— Dezső Kosztolányi

#understanding #life

And when wind and winter harden All the loveless land, It will whisper of the garden, You will understand. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#understanding #wife #marriage

Try to understand men. If you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love. ↗

— John Steinbeck

#hatred #understanding #love

If men could only know each other, they would neither idolize nor hate. ↗

— Elbert Hubbard

#understanding #men

The truly terrible thing is that everybody has their reasons. ↗

— Jean Renoir

#reason #reasoning #reasons #understanding #motivational

People who want to understand democracy should spend less time in the library with Aristotle and more time on the buses and in the subway. ↗

— Simeon Strunsky

#buses #democracy #less #library #more

Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding ↗

— Jacob Bronowski

#knowledge #nature #power #understanding #wisdom

We imagine always when we speak that it is our own ears, our own mind, that are listening. The truth which one puts into one's words does not carve out a direct path for itself, it is not irresistibly self-evident. A considerable time must elapse before a truth of the same order can take shape in them. ↗

— Marcel Proust

#understanding #communication

Maitre D' : I appreciate your understanding. Ferris: Don't think twice. It's understanding that makes it possible for people like us to tolerate a person like yourself. ↗

— John Hughes

#pretention #pretentiousness #respect #restaurants #snobbery

If other people do not understand our behavior—so what? Their request that we must only do what they understand is an attempt to dictate to us. If this is being "asocial" or "irrational" in their eyes, so be it. Mostly they resent our freedom and our courage to be ourselves. We owe nobody an explanation or an accounting, as long as our acts do not hurt or infringe on them. How many lives have been ruined by this need to "explain," which usually implies that the explanation be "understood," i.e. approved. Let your deeds be judged, and from your deeds, your real intentions, but know that a free person owes an explanation only to himself—to his reason and his conscience—and to the few who may have a justified claim for explanation. ↗

— Erich Fromm

#freedom #life #understanding #art