Top 100 Be Understood Quotes
#1. That's really a very different experience: You don't have to look to be understood. You're already understood.
Laurie Anderson
#2. Any work of art that can be understood is the product of journalism.
Tristan Tzara
#3. Presumably, God could have written these books any way He wanted. And if He wanted them to be understood in the spirit of twenty-first-century secular rationality, He could have left out all those bits about stoning people to death for adultery or witchcraft.
Sam Harris
#4. The Old and New Testaments contain but one scheme of religion. Neither part of this scheme can be understood without the other.
Richard Cecil
#5. Satisfied needs do not motivate. It's only the unsatisfied need that motivates. Next to physical survival, the greatest need of a human being is psychological survival - to be understood, to be affirmed, to be validated, to be appreciated.
Stephen Covey
#6. Let it be understood that we cannot go outside of this alternative: liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest; not liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest. The former carries society forward and favors all its best members; the latter carries society downwards and favors its worst members.
James O'Toole
#7. What cannot be understood by the human intellect need not be feared because it ultimately comes from God
Devdutt Pattanaik
#8. People don't want to be understood - I mean not completely. It's too destructive. Then they haven't anything left. They don't want complete sympathy or complete understanding. They want to be treated carelessly and taken for granted lots of times.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
#9. Saint Paul said the invisible must be understood by the visible. That was not a Hebrew idea, it was Greek.
Edith Hamilton
#10. She studied it soberly, with something like recognition or acknowledgment in her eyes, as if those who have been dead understand things that will never be understood by those who have only lived. In
Wallace Stegner
#11. The past cannot be undone. At best it can be understood so, perhaps, it can also be forgiven.
Barb Malek
#12. War, to be abolished, must be understood. To be understood, it must be studied." Karl Deutsch - preface of A Study of War by Quincy Wright. Added corollary by KMV: To abolish what is not understood is both arrogant and ignorant.
Karl Deutsch
#13. Somebody once said to me, 'If you want to be understood, don't write fiction.'
Mary Gaitskill
#14. The greatest service that can be offered to children who show personality traits or inclinations that might not be understood by the adults around them is to allow them to express their own unique humanity.
Wayne Dyer
#15. To understand my feelings - and my conception of the role of Secretary General - the nature of my religious and cultural background must first be understood. I should therefore like to outline not only my beliefs but also my conception of human institutions and of the human situation itself.
U Thant
#16. Men are in the habit, when the truth is exhibited by the servants of God, of saying, All is mystery; they have spoken in parables, and, therefore, are not to be understood. It is true they have eyes to see, and see not, but none are so blind as those who will not see.
Sam Smith
#17. The system is the work of art; the visual work of art is the proof of the System. The visual aspect can't be understood without understanding the system. It isn't what it looks like but what it is that is of basic importance.
Sol LeWitt
#18. I suggest to young professors that their first work should be written in a jargon only to be understood by the erudite few. With that behind them, they can ever after say what they have to say in a language 'understand of the people.'
Bertrand Russell
#19. The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.
Jeff VanderMeer
#20. Our alliances should be understood as a means to expand our influence, not as a constraint on our power. The expansion of democracy and freedom in the world should be a shared interest and value with all nations.
Chuck Hagel
#21. That portion of reality that can be composed within a frame can be understood.
Robert Breault
#22. Everybody wants to identify things about a poet or about a playwright. They want to codify something or put it in terms that can be understood. We want to understand something, because that's how our minds work. We like to understand things, and it's discomfiting if we don't understand things.
Anthony Zerbe
#23. I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose.
Charlie Chaplin
#24. I sometimes think it would be beneficial if people thought of each other as "historical factorials." Thus, (Myrtle!) would be understood not just as present-day Myrtle but as the product of all her past experiences.
John Allen Paulos
#25. The way people pray- casting my plea into the ether. A plea to be understood. Looking for signs.
M. Pierce
#26. The farther we peer into space, the more we realize that the nature of the universe cannot be understood fully by inspecting spiral galaxies or watching distant supernovas. It lies deeper. It involves our very selves.
Robert Lanza
#27. The critics try to intellectualize my material. There's no satire involved. Satire is a concept that can only be understood by adults. My stuff is straight, for people of all ages.
Andy Kaufman
#28. Being a female director become as professional as your male colleagues and forget the whole question about being female. You are female anyway and it is going to work in your favor. The scope of female professional superiority can be understood by so few men that mostly they do not miss it.
Pirjo Honkasalo
#29. Man is so constituted that health is a purely negative state. Hunger once satisfied, it is difficult for a man to imagine the horrors of starvation; they cannot be understood without being felt.
Jules Verne
#30. The jazz rhythm won't be understood by the bulk of my audience. That's the problem. We can get away with maybe one tune a night. It depends on where we place it. A song like 'Beyond the Sea,' the fans love that. It's fresh.
George Benson
#31. It would be like describing colors to someone blind from birth: The words might be understood, but the concept would remain mysterious and private.
Nicholas Sparks
#32. How shall the love of God be understood by those who have been nurtured in sight only of the greed of man?
Jacob A. Riis
#33. It is not the universal and the regular that characterize the individual, but rather the unique. He is not to be understood as a recurrent unit but as something unique and singular which in the last analysis can be neither known nor compared with anything else.
C. G. Jung
#35. In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.
Paul A.M. Dirac
#36. Unless one's philosophy is all-inclusive, nothing can be understood.
Mary Ritter Beard
#37. I suppose that was my first bit of acting, the acquisition of an English accent. It was really just an attempt to be understood.
Kenneth Branagh
#38. One of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
#39. How can the intensity of this shame be understood by those who have never experienced it? How can they understand the strength of the motivations produced by the desire to escape from it?
Didier Eribon
#40. But to be understood is not a human right. Even to understand oneself is not a human right.
Iris Murdoch
#41. What must be understood is this: attackers attack as a form of defence. It is their instinctive response to threat, real or perceived. It may be desperate or it may be habit, or both, when desperation becomes a way of life. Behind the assault hides a fragile person.
Steven Erikson
#42. It came to be believed that society could be understood using the same methods that are used to understand machines, and from there it was a small step to think that society is in fact a kind of machine.
John N. Gray
#43. The world of global drug production, shipping distribution, sales, and consumption is too complex, however, to be understood in any single us-and-them story.
John Gibler
#44. It's human desire to be understood. And we always feel we're not understood.
John Baldessari
#45. If God were small enough to be understood, He would not be big enough to be worshipped.
Evelyn Underhill
#46. Scriptural doctrine contains not abstruse speculation or philosophic reasoning, but very simple matters able to be understood by the most sluggish mind.
Baruch Spinoza
#48. The world of a cat is unlike any other. What is seen through their eyes cannot be understood by anyone besides another cat. Their world is filled with secrets and adventures that are always present and forever changing. To look at the world as a cat is to look through the veil of reality.
Alex G. Zarate
#49. The art of reading is the art of adopting the pace the author has set. Some books are fast and some are slow, but no book can be understood if it is taken at the wrong speed.
Mark Van Doren
#50. The individual may be understood as one particular focal point at which the whole universe expresses itself - as an incarnation of the self, or of the Godhead, or whatever one may choose to call it.
Alan Watts
#51. It is not true to say that God is unable to be understood, but it is true to say that he cannot be understood fully or exhaustively.
Wayne A. Grudem
#52. My first draft is usually how I meant it, but my second and third drafts is how I want to be understood.
Selena Haskins
#53. It is a fault to wish to be understood before we have made ourselves clear to ourselves.
Simone Weil
#54. I smile. Not just at bad clowns, but at "library science." I like that name. It makes a library sound as vast and mysterious as the universe or the ocean, requiring specific study to be understood.
Deb Caletti
#55. The uncertainty of tomorrow can only be understood by those who don't know for sure if they will live another day.
Rumiko Takahashi
#56. Since I became a knitting humor writer, I seem to be understood a little better - at least for the purposes of social discourse.
Stephanie Pearl-McPhee
#57. Chav-bashing draws on a long, ignoble tradition of class hatred. But it cannot be understood without looking at more recent events. Above all, it is the bastard child of a very British class war.
Owen Jones
#58. The totality of life cannot be understood, so runs Sufi teaching, if it is studied only through the methods which we use in everyday living.
Idries Shah
#60. When we speak the word 'life,' it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.
Antonin Artaud
#61. Everybody in the world wants to be understood and to have others appreciate them.
Being different is scary. Solitude is pain and loneliness.
Mizuki Nomura
#62. The revelatory or visionary is the province of the 'private' artist, who in order to render his personal world comprehensible or even tolerable, must force others to believe in it and therefore share it. It is said that 'the poet does not wish to be understood, but to be believed.
Kenneth Coutts-Smith
#63. If a warrior needs solace he simply chooses anyone and expresses to that person every detail of his turmoil. After all, the warrior is not seeking to be understood or helped; by talking he's merely relieving himself of his pressure.
Carlos Castaneda
#64. Apart from the before, the now has little meaning. The now is only a thin slice of who I am; isolated from the rich deposits of before, it cannot be understood.
Eugene H. Peterson
#66. 'It's much better to understand than to be understood,' from my mom.
Cara Santana
#67. There are already a lot of devices in our lives that have rich text or the ability to handle graphics. Our devices are designed to be understood in less than a quarter of a second.
David Rose
#68. People expect that they should be understood by you but seldom put in an effort to understand you.
Amit Abraham
#69. Rules must be established and enforced, and, as numbers are increased in prisons, the necessity for vigilance increases. These rules, let it be understood, may be kindly while firmly enforced. I would never suffer any exhibition of ill-temper or an arbitrary exercise of authority.
Dorothea Dix
#70. The beginnings and ends of shadow lie between the light and darkness and may be infinitely diminished and infinitely increased. Shadow is the means by which bodies display their form. The forms of bodies could not be understood in detail but for shadow.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#71. Man is this plural and collective unity in which the unity of destination and the differences of destinies are to be understood through each other.
Paul Ricoeur
#72. Base words are uttered only by the base And can for such at once be understood; But noble platitudes - ah, there's a case Where the most careful scrutiny is needed To tell a voice that's genuinely good From one that's base but merely has succeeded.
W. H. Auden
#73. And like nectar inside the bud,
my blood drinks from your blood, beloved,
and starves to join the salvation in your eyes;
to be understood again and again, by your nakedness and certainty, a humbleness that trickles into the crevices of my seasoned mind.
V.S. Atbay
#74. We all place ourselves at various levels, and we are constantly falling from these heights. It is the falls we are ashamed of. Self-esteem is the cause of our shame, of our fall. It is this self-esteem that must be understood, and not the fall.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#75. The unheard to hear - the unseen to see - the more to be understood: transparency. A purposeful guiding to a place of progression where ends come together and a bridge exists for the seeking to cross over onto a road of new and lasting hope.
Calvin W. Allison
#76. ...the world is complicated and it deserves to be understood complexly.
Hank Green
#77. What a trade! Poor painters! They always wish to be understood, and they are analysed instead.
Pablo Picasso
#78. Anything which must be understood by millions of people is so hopelessly divorced from how it is that it becomes a form of fiction.
Terence McKenna
#79. Love doesn't need to be understood, it needs to be demonstrated
Paulo Coelho
#80. If mathematics is to be understood widely, we need to emphasise its elegance and its applications. Sometimes it seems that universities want to emphasise how difficult it is!
Johnny Ball
#81. That's the truth," Quinton said. "I think that's what all of us are looking for, inside of BDSM or not. To be understood, to find our like-minded tribe, to be accepted and belong, no matter what.
Laura Kaye
#82. It felt good to sit around and agree, to have a common enemy and a shared struggle. It felt good to be understood.
Nadia Hashimi
#83. In speaking of the Energy of the field, however, I wish to be understood literally. All energy is the same as mechanical energy, whether it exists in the form of motion or in that of elasticity, or in any other form. The energy in electromagnetic phenomena is mechanical energy.
James Clerk Maxwell
#84. You will never know the feeling of a driver when winning a race. The helmet hides feelings that cannot be understood.
Ayrton Senna
#85. Spelling and punctuation are completely irrelevant; unless you are hoping to be understood.
Henry G. Sheppard
#86. Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.
George Orwell
#87. Nine times out of 10, women don't want to fix a problem, they just want to be understood. I'll never get that.
Matthew Perry
#88. But in the meantime, you must be content, I say, to be misunderstood for a while. 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.
George MacDonald
#89. Americans assume that we never go to war to sustain our wealth, because war must be understood as a moral enterprise commensurate with our being a democracy.
Stanley Hauerwas
#90. Transgressions are to be understood and corrected, not dwelt upon or agonized over.
Barbara Ann Kipfer
#91. There is more information in one thimble of reality
than can be understood by a galaxy of human brains. It is
beyond the human brain to understand the world and its
environment, so the brain compensates by creating simplified
illusions that act as a replacement for understanding.
Scott Adams
#92. The new anthropology required each culture to be understood on its own terms, as a product of its own evolution rather than as merely an earlier stage in the ascent toward Western civilization.
Guy Deutscher
#93. The Birth-chart has to be understood as the archetype or seed-pattern of one's individual being - as the 'symbolic' form of one's individuality, and therefore also of one's destiny, for the two are identical.
Dane Rudhyar
#94. The trip to Mars can only be understood through Black Americans. I say, the trip to Mars can only be understood through Black Americans.
Nikki Giovanni
#95. We all desire to be understood, but no one enjoys being obvious.
Trevanian
#96. Art is a way of expression that has to be understood by everyone, everywhere.
Rufino Tamayo
#97. This is probably the single great subject of horror fiction: our need to cope with a mystery that can be understood only with the aid of a helpful imagination.
Stephen King
#98. What the person, who knows the truth, will speak, will not be understood by the person who does not know the truth.
Devdutt Pattanaik
#99. May we help more than we hurt, may we seek to understand more than be understood and may we love more than we judge.
Cory Booker
#100. I look at myself, and I see a Spanish person who's trying to be understood by an English-speaking audience and is putting a lot of energy into that, instead of into expressing himself freely and feeling comfortable.
Javier Bardem
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