Top 100 Not Understood Quotes
#1. The problem is that democracy is not freedom. Democracy is simply majoritarianism, which is inherently incompatible with real freedom. Our founding fathers clearly understood this.
Ron Paul
#2. something glorious a minute later. How could anyone not have an orgasm? While she didn't ask for his cock, her mouth opened as she gulped in air. Perhaps it was when she dropped her head back that he understood she was ever so close, because he shut off the vibrator and pulled it out.
Vella Day
#3. And it's true. It's so true. All those years of loving Zik because he never asked about Eve ... I never realized, I never understood. It was his job as my best friend not to ask.
But it was my job as his best friend to tell him without being asked.
Barry Lyga
#4. There is a great streak of violence in every human being. If it is not channeled and understood, it will break out in war or in madness.
Sam Peckinpah
#5. I believe if people understood each other more, if people took the time and realize it's not 'all about me' and I'm on a big planet with a lot of other people and concerns, maybe we can learn how to get along with each other.
Esai Morales
#6. The foundation of our Empire was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition, but at an Epoch when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period.
George Washington
#7. I understood then why people were so often defeated by this world. Perhaps the web of support that they required just did not come into alignment when it had to. Or perhaps our culture lacked the channels by which to offer this support.
Guy Mankowski
#8. If anybody says he can think about quantum physics without getting giddy, that only shows he has not understood the first thing about them.
Niels Bohr
#9. My feelings are not often shared, not often understood - Marianne Dashwood
Jane Austen
#10. Marx understood well that the press was not merely a machine but a structure for discourse, which both rules out and insists upon certain kinds of content and, inevitably, a certain kind of audience.
Neil Postman
#11. I am in between. Trying to write to be understood by those who matter to me, yet also trying to push my mind with ideas beyond the everyday. It is another borderland I inhabit. Not quite here nor there. On good days I feel I am a bridge. On bad days I just feel alone.
Sergio Troncoso
#12. What is the science of Vitraag (the enlightened ones free of attachment)? [It is that where] If one understands a single word of the Vitarag, there will be no pain. But one has not understood a single word of 'Vir', the Vitaraag Lord Mahavir [The 24th Tirthankar]
Dada Bhagwan
#13. Love, I take it, must look toward something not quite accessible, something not quite understood.
James Branch Cabell
#14. Truth was something intangible, unseen, which sometimes we stumbled upon and did not recognize, but was found, and held, and understood only by old people near their death, or sometimes by the very pure, the very young.
Daphne Du Maurier
#15. The problem with not having anybody to tell you what to do, I understood, is that there was nobody to tell you what not to do.
Augusten Burroughs
#17. lost a great innocence when I understood that I and my mind were not going to be on good terms for the rest of my life. I can't tell you how tired I am of character-building experiences. But I treasure this part of me; whoever loves me loves me with this in it.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#18. He understood very little about this strange situation, and to act in a situation one does not understand is to invite the most terrible consequences.
Stephen King
#19. Most writers agree on the fact that Zen is not to be understood but to be lived; and far from being incompatible with the requirements of everyday life, Zen confers on it its own full revealing value.
Robert Linssen
#20. Speak simple, speak plain, speak clear, otherwise you may not be understood! The objective of a speech is to be understood! Let your message be obvious, as obvious as the message of the wind for the sailboat!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#21. Under the urge of nature and according to the laws of development, though not understood by the adult, the child is obliged to be serious about two fundamental things ... the first is the love of activity ... The second fundamental thing is independence.
Maria Montessori
#22. If one were to ask ... "What is slavery?" and I should answer in one word, "murder," my meaning would be understood at once. Why, then, to this other question: "What is property?" may I not likewise answer, "theft" ... ?
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
#23. Nostradamus himself confessed that the vague manner in which he wrote his "prophecies" was so that 'they could not possibly be understood until they were interpreted after the event and by it.'
James Randi
#24. Peace is not something petty, created by the mind; it is enormously great, infinitely extensive, and it can be understood only when the heart is full.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#25. Pain is not something to be feared; it is something to be understood.
Pete Egoscue
#26. In the past, before the physiology of abdominal training was well understood, bodybuilders used to do a lot of "conventional" abdominal exercises such as Sit-Ups and Leg Raises. Unfortunately, those are not primary abdominal exercises but instead work the iliopsoas muscles - the hip flexors.
Arnold Schwarzenegger
#27. Properly understood, then, the scriptures counsel us to be virtuous not because romantic love is bad, but precisely because romantic love is so good. It is not only good; it is pure, precious, even sacred and holy.
Bruce C. Hafen
#28. The truth of practical intellect is understood not as conformity to an extramental being but as conformity to a right desire; the end is no longer to know what is, but to bring into existence that which is not yet.
Jacques Maritain
#29. If a dread of not being understood be hidden in the breasts of other young people to anything like the extent to which it used to be hidden in mine - which I consider probable, as I have no particular reason to suspect myself of having been a monstrosity - it is the key to many reservations.
Charles Dickens
#30. More than once at TechCrunch, we made AOL extremely uncomfortable with things that we wrote. But they never ordered us to write or not write about something because they understood that not only would we not comply, we'd write a post about the whole thing.
Michael Arrington
#31. Experience teaches us not to assume that the obvious is clearly understood
Paulo Freire
#32. Treville understood admirably well the warfare of that period, when, if you did not live at the enemy's expense, you lived at the expense of your compatriots: his soldiers formed a legion of daredevils, undisciplined for anyone else but him.
Alexandre Dumas
#33. Art is not there simply to be understood ... It is more the sense of an indication or suggestion.
Joseph Beuys
#34. I'm not sure that when I read 'Treasure Island' for the first time, when I was about 10, I understood all the words or what was going on. But that didn't stop me reading it, and I certainly didn't forget it.
Mal Peet
#35. He had a theory that musicians are incredibly complex, and know far less than other artists what they want and what they are; that they puzzle themselves as well as their friends; that their psychology is a modern development, and has not yet been understood.
E. M. Forster
#36. Thoroughly understand what it is to understand, and not only will you understand the broad lines of all there is to be understood but also you will possess a fixed base, an invariant pattern, opening upon all further developments of understanding,
Bernard Lonergan
#37. The epiphany I had in my career in randomness came when I understood that I was not intelligent enough, nor strong enough, to even try to fight my emotions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#38. Noah doesn't hold hands often. In fact, it was one of the few rules I understood, and it's not lost on me how special this moment is. It's like the roses. Noah's showing me his love.
Katie McGarry
#39. When the founding fathers conceived of this new nation, they understood that the education of its citizens would be essential to the health of their democratic enterprise. Knowledge was not just a luxury; it was essential.
Azar Nafisi
#40. If you look at Charles Dickens's time, there were so many different levels of society and everybody understood their place in it, it was that complex and simple. I'm not sure we have that now.
Anthony Horowitz
#41. Which knew and understood and did not shy away from the understanding that there would be pain. Which could accept shattering, could reassemble itself, could stand taller than before.
Nick Harkaway
#42. When you truly love someone, his/her weaknesses are not meant to be discussed with other people, they are meant to be understood by you.
Olaotan Fawehinmi
#43. While Dmitri, as the leader of Raphael's Seven, could not accept such a weakness, the mortal he'd once been, the one who had loved a woman with a wide mouth and eyes of slanted brown ... that man understood what it was to love so deeply it was a kind of beautiful madness.
Nalini Singh
#44. Our children do not need a makeover, they just need to be understood. If you understand their emotional needs now, you can save them a lifetime of searching for what they never had as a child.
Florence Littauer
#45. ...it is not news that we live in a world
Where beauty is unexplainable
And suddenly ruined
And has its own routines. We are often far
From home in a dark town, and our griefs
Are difficult to translate into a language
Understood by others.
Charlie Smith
#46. I have tried to be honest with you, although I suppose that you would really have been more interested in my not being honest. Some of these things happened, and some were dreams. They were all true, as I understood truth. They are all real, as I understood reality.
Penelope Mortimer
#47. What I've understood is that to be funny is not my job. To see funny is my job.
Anna D. Shapiro
#48. As Alexander Hamilton said in 'The Federalist Papers,' law is about the exercise of judgment and not will. Judicial activism is best understood as substituting judicial opinion for the command of law. The law is not an infinitely malleable tool.
Edwin Meese
#49. If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#50. Harry understood that those left behind - the failures and the deformed, the suffering and the dead - are not just equal in soul, but that they are we and we are they. Struggle as we may for distinction, soon enough we fail, and, without exception, follow.
Mark Helprin
#51. Casper didn't give me direction for what to do if somebody I used to really like-like, somebody who would be somebody good to love, somebody right, somebody who understood about me, turned out to not have the same ideas about me.
Kathleen Glasgow
#52. I suffer, therefore I am special. I am not understood, but for precisely that reason, I am worthy of greater understanding. 13.
Alain De Botton
#53. How come no one understood me, and more importantly, how come I was starting to not understand myself?
Kimberly Lauren
#54. Most of them had not understood Blackberry's discovery of the raft and at once forgot it.
Richard Adams
#55. When we begin to glimpse the reality of God, the natural reaction is to worship him. Not to have that reaction is a fairly sure sign that we haven't yet really understood who he is or what he's done.
N. T. Wright
#56. Ender understood more than she said. Manipulation of gravity was one thing; deception by the officers was another; but the most important message was this: the adults are the enemy, not the other armies. They do not tell us the truth.
Orson Scott Card
#57. He took the box but did not avail himself of a tissue. She understood. Sometimes it was comforting to feel the wetness of grief's tears on your face.
Julius Lester
#58. The most authentic Russian Impressionism leaves one perplexed if one compares it with Monet and Pissarro. Here, in the Louvre, before the canvases of Manet, Millet and others, I understood why my alliance with Russia and Russian art did not take root.
Marc Chagall
#59. I never really understood who the Magi were as a child. What is a Magi? Not a word I would use, but a magpie I could understand.
Michael Leunig
#60. but the older he got, the better he understood; forgiveness was an act done after the fact - a piece of the bad deeds future - and if you point the people's eyes to the future they might not see what is being done to hurt them in the present.
Yaa Gyasi
#61. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.
Ayn Rand
#62. I'm not one of those writers I learned about who get up in the morning, put a piece of paper in their typewriter machine and start writing. That I've never understood.
Wole Soyinka
#63. The meaning of the directions in kata is not well understood, and frequently mistakes are made in the interpretation of kata movements. In extreme cases, it is sometimes heard that "this kata moves in 8 directions so it is designed for fighting 8 opponents" or some such nonsense.
Kenwa Mabuni
#64. I believe every act of violence is also a message that needs to be understood. Violence should not be answered just by greater violence but by real understanding. We must ask: 'Where is the violence coming from? What is its meaning?
Jean Vanier
#65. There's this funny thing about empathy. It's not actually in limited supply. Just because other people have it worse doesn't mean you don't deserve to be understood. To feel comfort.
Cora Carmack
#66. Therefore I beg you, reader, not to rejoice too greatly if you have read much, but if you have understood much. Nor that you have understood much, but that you have been able to retain it. Otherwise it is of little profit either to read or to understand.
Hugh Of Saint-Victor
#67. What is the art world? I never really understood. I started doing this stuff to do what I want to do. Not to be this or that.
Urs Fischer
#68. True salvation always produces an abiding change of nature in a true convert. Therefore, whenever holiness of life does not accompany a confession of conversion, it must be understood that this individual is not a Christian.
Jonathan Edwards
#69. And he knew that at that moment, they understood each other perfectly, and when he told her what he was going to do now, she would not say 'be careful' or 'don't do it', but she would accept his decision because she would not have expected anything less of him.
J.K. Rowling
#70. Death is nothing to us, it matters not one jot, since the nature of the mind is understood to be mortal.
Lucretius
#71. I understood the life around me better, not from love, which everybody acknowledges to be a great teacher, but from estrangement, to which nobody has attributed the power of reinforcing insight
Nirad C. Chaudhuri
#72. On this walk I'd had so much time and space to actually figure out who I was without my mother's influence. I understood now: the things that my mother had found made her happy were not the same as the things that made me happy. And I understood: that was okay.
Aspen Matis
#73. Where I am not understood, it shall be concluded that something very useful and profound is couched underneath.
Jonathan Swift
#74. Senators came to realize that he understood not only their bills but the reasons they had introduced them;
Robert A. Caro
#75. I do not believe in adding enrichment merely for the sake of enrichment. Unless it adds clearness to the enunciation of the theme, it is undesirable, for it is very little understood.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#76. I could not help but see the hand of the balancer in all of this. Could hatred and determination be a counterweight to organization and experience? I suddenly understood something about the old god of death and why he was also the god of balances.
Robin Hobb
#77. Folks, the message of Christ is simple. It's not heady, or high-minded, or supremely intellectual at all. It is simple on purpose. It is simple enough to be understood by every person.
Curtis A. Chamberlain
#78. Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power are always an index of how much is not understood about a disease.
Susan Sontag
#79. My wife was the first romantic partner who understood both American and native parts of me - not so much the positive stuff, but the damage.
Sherman Alexie
#80. As I sat there in the pew during the altar call, I suddenly understood that if I didn't surrender to Him I would go to Hell when I died. It wasn't Hell itself that scared me - or not just Hell. It was the idea that my mother was going to Heaven without me.
Daryl Gregory
#81. Quietly, dispassionately, Russell would make sure the senator understood not only the reasons why he should take the same position on the bill that Russell was taking, but the reasons why he should take an opposing position.
Robert A. Caro
#82. In many regions, war and terror prevail. States disintegrate. For many years, we have read about this. We have heard about it. We have seen it on TV. But we had not yet sufficiently understood that what happens in Aleppo and Mosul can affect Essen or Stuttgart. We have to face that now.
Angela Merkel
#83. When Ignatius understood that God did not wish him to remain at Jerusalem, he began to consider what he should do. The plan he approved and adopted was to enter upon a course of study in order to be better fitted to save souls.
Saint Ignatius
#84. Rowing was not simple for me. I nodded whenever the instructor made a point, as if I understood, but I could as easily have assembled the space shuttle as have repeated the moves she was explaining.
Barry S. Strauss
#85. If you endeavor to embrace the Way through much learning, the Way will not be understood. If you observe the Way with simplicity of heart, great indeed is this Way.
Gautama Buddha
#86. America became a great nation early on not because it was flooded with politicians, but because it was flooded with people who understood the value of personal responsibility, hard work, creativity, innovation, and that's what will get us on the right track now, as well.
Benjamin Carson
#87. When I started as a White House correspondent, there was a lot of criticism from guys saying, 'She focuses too much on the person but not enough on policy.' I never understood that argument at all. I just didn't agree with the premise.
Maureen Dowd
#88. No part of the world can be truly understood without a knowledge of its garment of vegetation, for this determines not only the nature of the animal inhabitants but also the occupations of the majority of human beings.
Ellsworth Huntington
#89. The heavy round face was looking at him, the hard look of a man who had also understood, who had seen all the stupidity, who knew, after all, that the gold stars were often mindless decoration, that the army was led not by symbols, but by the fallible egos and blind fantasies of men.
Jeff Shaara
#91. No data on air propellers was available, but we had always understood that it was not a difficult matter to secure an efficiency of 50% with marine propellers.
Orville Wright
#92. The whole reason for the success of Dr. King's civil-rights movement was that it was not a movement for itself. The civil-rights movement understood very clearly, and stated very beautifully, that it was a question of humanism, not a sectarian movement at all.
Christopher Hitchens
#93. The issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should. I've got Greenspan's book.
John McCain
#94. Words are good, but there is something better. The best is not to be explained by words. The spirit in which we act is the chief matter. Action can only be understood and represented by the spirit.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#95. Human is very odd living being. I have not understood anything so far.
Shankar Lamichhane
#96. A Healing Dream can never be completely "interpreted," or fully understood. Healing Dreams want us to stop making sense; not just to crack the case, but to enter the mystery.
Marc Ian Barasch
#97. The totalitarian phenomenon is not to be understood without making an allowance for the thesis that some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny: either to exercise it themselves or - much more mysteriously - to submit to it.
Jean Francois Revel
#98. If we think the main mission of the church is to improve life in Adam and add a little moral strength to this fading evil age, we have not yet understood the radical condition for which Christ is such a radical solution.
Michael S. Horton
#99. A problem thoroughly understood is always fairly simple. Found your opinions on facts, not prejudices. We know too many things that are not true.
Charles Kettering
#100. When I came to Los Angeles, it was the first time that I ever felt like I belong somewhere. Not because it was wacky, but because people here understood what I felt like to perform, and there were other kids my age who wanted to do it. I didn't get looked at as God, you freak.
Jennifer Love Hewitt
