Top 100 Quotes About Being Understood
#1. A truth may be useful without being understood, indeed without being believed.
Frank Durham
#2. The experience of being understood, versus interpreted, is so compelling you can charge admission.
B. Joseph Pine II
#3. 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
#4. So many important things pass quickly without being understood at the time. So many powerful moments are buried beneath the absurd
Dan Simmons
#5. It is quite clear that between love and understanding there is a very close link ... He who loves understands, and he who understands loves. One who feels understood feels loved, and one who feels loved feels sure of being understood.
Paul Tournier
#6. I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.
Kahlil Gibran
#7. I write from my knowledge not my lack, from my strength not my weakness. I am not interested if anyone knows whether or not I am familiar with big words, I am interested in trying to render big ideas in a simple way. I am interested in being understood not admired.
Lucille Clifton
#8. The feeling of not being understood and of not understanding the world is no mere accompaniment of first passion, but its sole non-accidental cause. And the passion itself is a panic-stricken flight in which being together with the other means only a doubled solitude.
Robert Musil
#9. Being understood is not the most essential thing in life.
Jodie Foster
#10. And he couldn't stand to be nothing, to know himself to be nothing. He needs to be listened to, he needs to be heard. He needs at least the illusion of being understood.
Margaret Atwood
#11. In love one had need of being believed, in friendship of being understood.
Abel Bonnard
#12. She sniffed, and smiled a bit, but not too much because if there is one thing worse than someone who doesn't understand you it's someone who understands perfectly, before you've had a chance to have a good pout about not being understood.
Terry Pratchett
#13. The universe, as we see it, is the result of regularly working forces, having a causal connection with each other and therefore capable of being understood by human reason.
Ludwig Buchner
#15. Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood - never.
Albert Camus
#16. This being understood, let us proceed with our history.
Alexandre Dumas
#17. Those who say that climate change doesn't exist are being understood as the flat-earthers that they are, as the people who deny the link between smoking and cancer, as the people who denied the link between HIV and AIDS.
Nicholas Stern
#18. In the collective psyche it is being understood ... that we can cultivate wisdom and compassion.
Tara Brach
#19. The motto is, focus on understanding, not on being understood.
Thomas D. Zweifel
#20. Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#21. The people who understand the issues say they don't make the decisions and the people who make the decisions say they don't have the time to understand the issues. Either way, decisions are being made without the issues being understood.
Balan Gothandaraman
#22. Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.
Alain De Botton
#23. I guess I'm quite used to not being understood rather than being understood.
Bjork
#24. Because the fact of not being understood by other people had become my only real source of pride, I was never confronted by any impulse to express things and to make others understand something that I knew.
Yukio Mishima
#25. For a woman there is nothing more erotic than being understood.
Molly Haskell
#26. Is this love - this easy generosity, this sense of being understood at last, of not having to pretend?
J.M. Coetzee
#27. The Gita has sung the praises of Knowledge, but it is beyond the mere intellect; it is essentially addressed to the heart and capable of being understood by the heart.
Mahatma Gandhi
#28. Being liked or not, having company or not, being understood or not, being acknowledged or not are not issues of concern on the spiritual path.
Donna Goddard
#29. The person who knew you best when you were seventeen will always have a claim on you, no matter how much you change. There's something seductive and magnetic about it, the feeling of being understood like that. I suppose it goes both ways." (19)
Lauren Fox
#30. When I meet with any persons who write obscurely or converse confusedly, I am apt to suspect two things; first, that such persons do not understand themselves; and secondly, that they are not worthy of being understood by others.
Charles Caleb Colton
#31. Perhaps you've only grown up when you can bear not being understood.
Marian Gold
#32. Accept complete responsibility both for understanding and for being understood.
Brian Tracy
#33. I'm on record as being understood to be a supporter of a reformed establishment, in which other Christian denominations, and other faiths, play a major part.
George Carey
#34. A women under stress is not immediately concerned with finding solutions to her problems but rather seeks relief by expressing herself and being understood.
John Gray
#35. Each human being has the right to seek out joy, joy being understood as something which makes one content - not necessarily that which makes others content.
Paulo Coelho
#37. It is not necessary to be too avant-garde, because you risk not being understood.
Domenico Dolce
#38. The highest art ... sets down its creations and trusts in their magic, without fear of not being understood.
Hermann Hesse
#39. If there is one subject in this world worthy of being discussed, worthy of being understood, it is the question of intellectual liberty. Without that, we are simply painted clay.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#40. I rarely interacted much with anyone back then who wasn't retarded. When I did, it struck me how pompous and impatient they were, always measuring their words, twisting things around. Everybody was so obsessed with being understood. It made me sick.
Ottessa Moshfegh
#41. My greatness is not dependent on it being understood by others. My greatness lies in the acceptance of none other than myself.
Denika Carothers
#42. A leader who confines his role to his people's experience dooms himself to stagnation; a leader who outstrips his people's experience runs the risk of not being understood.
Henry A. Kissinger
#43. There's nothing more intimate in life than simply being understood. And understanding someone else.
Brad Meltzer
#44. I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect
Fernando Pessoa
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. Some women can't stand being pregnant, getting big and bloated, and hauling around a giant stomach, and some women, for reasons probably understood by Darwin, love it.
Rich Cohen
#48. The wizards were civilized men of considerable education and culture. When faced with being inadvertently marooned on a desert island they understood immediately that the first thing to do was place the blame
Terry Pratchett
#49. 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
#50. All positive interactions with other human beings involve, to some degree, the experience of visibility
that is, the experience of being seen and understood.
Nathaniel Branden
#51. 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
#52. Your problem is that you have never fully understood the power of being a desired woman.
Kyra Davis
#53. While I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw;
For I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being....And I saw that it was holy
Black Elk
#55. 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
#56. Having seen all of their fathers and husbands walk out the door[...], each woman understood most completely the nature of women's interconnectedness. Being reliant upon only women also had meant that the particulars of problem solving were addressed in ways known to women and using women's methods.
Tracey Lindberg
#57. They were all employed full time as actors in a play they understood, that any human being anywhere could understand and applaud." "So life became a work of art," I marveled.
Kurt Vonnegut
#58. In the East, especially in contemplative traditions like those of Buddhism, being distracted by thought is understood to be the very wellspring of human suffering.
Sam Harris
#59. 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
#60. It was understood that nothing of a tender nature could possibly be confided to old Barley, by reason of his being totally unequal to the consideration of any subject more psychological than gout, rum, and purser's stores.
Charles Dickens
#61. Nobody can know ... just how heavy a burden trying to protect another human being can be. I was still a child. I couldn't have understood the real meaning of my promise.
CLAMP
#62. ...Mrs. Percy understood that staying beautiful all day long is the most important aspect of being married...
Tevin Hansen
#63. She wanted to tell him that she understood him now, in a way she'd never understood anyone before. Because she was with him. It wasn't even like being in the web; it was much closer than that, much deeper. He'd torn down all the barriers and put his soul into her hands.
L.J.Smith
#64. If I were to say that I grew up in East Los Angeles in the projects poor, I assumed that everybody understood that it came with its own reasons for being the way I am. I didn't get that people needed to understand where my comedy came from; I thought that they knew that. Now I tell people.
Carlos Mencia
#65. I wanted to be understood. As a human-being, and as a writer. That meant getting to (truly) know myself- away from the opinions, beliefs, assumptions, criticism, and judgement of others. It meant re-learning language... to speak concisely. It meant learning the language of my heart and soul.
Cheri Bauer
#66. I understood that 'The Yellow Birds' would be a peculiar representation of the experience of being at war. I intended it to be so.
Kevin Powers
#67. Don't you see what's happened? You wanted to be in love again. To feel that feeling where a man you hardly know gazes into your eyes and seems to be the only human being who ever understood the real you.
Nancy Horan
#68. I've never understood all this fuss people make about the dawn. I've seen a few and they're never as good as the photographs, which have the additional advantage of being things you can look at when you're in the right frame of mind, which is usually around lunchtime.
Douglas Adams
#69. I have suffered from being misunderstood, but I would have suffered a hell of a lot more if I had been understood.
Clarence Darrow
#70. Human is very odd living being. I have not understood anything so far.
Shankar Lamichhane
#71. Being a doctor he didn't want for choices, but also being a doctor he understood the fragility of bone and sinew that encompassed the even more fragile organ of the heart. He envisioned Therese's as being wound in intricate, tight, vinelike veins that he would slowly make sense of and unravel.
Tara Lynn Masih
#73. That much he understood now - the compulsion born of secrecy, how silence was its own sort of prison. The relief that came with being able to tell someone, anyone, all those things you were supposed to keep locked up.
Kit Rocha
#74. Some comics really thrive on being disrespectful, especially toward women, and it's somehow understood as edgy, but I'm the opposite. I've never liked curse words for that reason.
Bryan Callen
#75. When you brought the Industrial Revolution in, all of a sudden India and China went from being the dominant global powers to being powers dominated by those who understood how to apply this new technology.
Juan Enriquez
#76. A sense of community has always been important to me. I understood very early that I could not grow as an artist or as a person without being connected to institutions and clients that served the community.
Jerry Pinkney
#77. Okay, a lot of people think that I'm someone known for a love of eggs and egg cookery. Being asked to endorse an egg yolk separator, I mean, I understood where it came from, but it didn't seem necessarily like something that was ultimately worth pursuing.
Wylie Dufresne
#78. The shortage of buyers, which the world is suffering from, is readily understood, not as due to people not wishing to obtain possession of goods, but as people being unwilling to part with something which might earn a regular income in exchange for those goods.
Paul Dirac
#79. Tattooing, when understood in its entirety, must be seen as a religious act. The human being brings forth images from the center of the self and communicates them to the world. Fantasy is embodied in reality and the person is made whole.
Spider Webb
#80. Before I gave birth to Lukas, I hadn't truly understood that painful, consuming, I-will-do-anything-to-save-this-human-being kind of love.
Lynsey Addario
#81. Men always want to be terribly influential, but I see that as somewhat external. Do I imagine myself being influential? No. I want to understand. And if others understand
in the same sense that I have understood
that gives me a sense of satisfaction, like feeling at home.
Hannah Arendt
#82. I have never quite understood the relationship between beauty and weakness, womanly sweetness and womanly silliness; to my mind, indeed, that woman being the most beautiful who is the most capable, while weakness and silliness can never by any chance be other than unlovely.
Eliza Lynn Linton
#83. When I came to the Senate in 1997, the world was being redefined by forces no single country controlled or understood. The implosion of the Soviet Union and a historic diffusion of economic and geopolitical power created new influences and established new global power centers - and new threats.
Chuck Hagel
#84. Nobody understood what it was like to be black and Jewish ... being different from everyone else just made me a lot stronger.
Drake
#85. I grew to understand or really grasp a sense of what the power of being humble is - that becomes a practice. Otherwise you'll be crushed by your fear of being humiliated. It'll control you the rest of your life. I really understood that. I haven't mastered it, I haven't come close to it.
Caroline Myss
#86. Perhaps I finally understood that being was only possible when you can accept that it doesn't entail being anything in particular.
Lars Muhl
#87. He suddenly understood the message of so many spiritual teachers that the only revolution that can work is the inner transformation of every human being.
Stanislav Grof
#88. I remember during Oscar season, the thing I hated most was being talked to differently; people treat you differently. And then I suddenly understood why celebrities can be so weird; it's hard to act normal when no-one treats you normally.
Jennifer Lawrence
#89. People are so ... seem so chaotic internally, but being filtered through some form, like making a record, sort of filters it down into something that can be understood.
Elliott Smith
#90. The Gnostic (Knowing) Christians understood these principles being taught by Jesus that were hidden away in so many ingenious ways. The ruling classes at the time feared the true teachings of Jesus. These teachings had been relayed to the disciples and they performed many miracles with them.
Lee Vickers
#91. I had always wondered what Reverend Lovoy meant when he talked about "grace." I understood it now. It was being able to give up something that it broke your heart to lose, and be happy about it.
Robert McCammon
#92. For me, it was a wonderful surprise because I saw wonderful actors being very professional working in front of me [on Chicken with Plums]. I finally understood what an actor is and what an actor does. On a daily basis, it's a bit repetitive.
Vincent Paronnaud
#93. The clarity of Scripture means that the Bible is written in such a way that its teachings are able to be understood by all who will read it seeking God's help and being willing to follow it.
Wayne Grudem
#94. Though what we accept be true, it is a prejudice unless we ourselves have considered and understood why and how it is true.
John Lancaster Spalding
#95. Beauty, however, must here be understood in its original meaning: as the glow of the true and the good irradiating from every ordered state of being, and not in the patent significance of immediate sensual appeal.
Josef Pieper
#96. I understood that I was being shown the future: shards of what would come to be. Often, I cried out for the pain of it. But other times, I was comforted, because I saw, for an instant, the pattern of the whole.
Geraldine Brooks
#97. And being alone made me want to talk to someone my own age. Someone who understood that using the "f" word wasn't a measure of my lack of imagination. Sometimes using that word just made me feel free.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#98. I never understood that when I heard people retire - they said they missed being around the guys. I don't have a need to make a play in the ninth inning of a game anymore. But being on the inside and being part of a team is something that you really do value and you really do miss.
Cal Ripken Jr.
#99. Good design, at least part of the time, includes the criterion of being direct in relation to the problem at hand - not obscure, trendy, or stylish. A new language, visual or verbal, must be couched in a language that is already understood.
Ivan Chermayeff
#100. My mom once told me, back when I was a kid, that I would never understand girls unless I understood the fear of being lonely and alone. She said no girl would ever understand boys unless she understood the fear of being dishonored and defeated.
John C. Wright
