Top 66 Quotes About Not Being Understood
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. The highest art ... sets down its creations and trusts in their magic, without fear of not being understood.
Hermann Hesse
#5. It is not necessary to be too avant-garde, because you risk not being understood.
Domenico Dolce
#6. Perhaps you've only grown up when you can bear not being understood.
Marian Gold
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. I guess I'm quite used to not being understood rather than being understood.
Bjork
#10. Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.
Alain De Botton
#11. 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. 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
#14. 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
#16. But then I grew up, experienced some life, and I understood that when you merely switch from being a prisoner to being a guard, no one is freed, not even yourself.
Lisa Crystal Carver
#17. Both those taking snaps and documentary photographers, however, have not understood 'information.' What they produce are camera memories, not information, and the better they do it, the more they prove the victory of the camera over the human being.
Vilem Flusser
#18. A religious symbol conveys its message even if it is no longer consciously understood in every part. For a symbol speaks to the whole human being and not only to the intelligence.
Mircea Eliade
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. Could it be? Had I actually found another human being who understood that VD was not a day for celebration but a cursed, commercial piece of bullshit lorded over by a tiny cherub-shaped tyrant?
Samantha Young
#22. Art when really understood is the province of every human being. It is simply a question of doing things, anything, well. It is not an outside, extra thing.
Robert Henri
#23. 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
#24. If the secret of being a bore is to tell all, the secret of pleasing is to say just enough to be - not understood, but divined.
Remy De Gourmont
#25. 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
#26. My greatness is not dependent on it being understood by others. My greatness lies in the acceptance of none other than myself.
Denika Carothers
#27. They understood me. Not just the alcoholism, but the being I am who happens to have alcoholism. For that distinction alone, I am forever in their debt.
Taiyu John Robertson
#28. The secret of being a writer: not to expect others to value what you've done as you value it. Not to expect anyone else to perceive in it the emotions you have invested in it. Once this is understood, all will be well.
Joyce Carol Oates
#29. had to be men, and Brody hated himself for not being able to control that. He hated that he was taught to hate himself and anyone like him before he'd ever understood who he was. If not, maybe he wouldn't be so fucked-up right now. So fucked-up that nothing worked except men.
Sam B. Morgan
#30. I've never understood why people get mad at others for not being interested in them romantically - especially when there are so many reasons to be mad at people that are within their control.
Ingrid Weir
#31. You know, I used to not understand fashion, a lot of it, but I completely understood being a playwright or a screenwriter and suddenly having an actor say your words and making them come to life. That I can understand. Finally, I'm starting to understand this.
Reese Witherspoon
#32. Unique among the nations, America recognized the source of our character as being godly and eternal, not being civic and temporal. And because we have understood that our source is eternal, America has been different. We have no king but Jesus.
John Ashcroft
#33. She understood him with the knowing and not-knowing that comes of being a child. When you focus on your parent as if they are the center of the earth, that thing on which your survival depends, only later do you realize their flaws, their scars, and their weaknesses.
Scott Cawthon
#34. The Church's challenge is staying close to the people, close to the people of the United States, not being a detached Church from the people but close to them, close, close, and this is something that the Church in the United States has understood and understood well.
Pope Francis
#35. There is a view in some philosophical circles that anything that can be understood by people who have not studied philosophy is not profound enough to be worth saying. To the contrary, I suspect that whatever cannot be said clearly is probably not being thought clearly either.
Peter Singer
#36. I think that anybody who thinks science is going to explain everything in biological systems, or in physical cosmology, et cetera, is actually mistaken, because I think within science - if correctly understood - those claims are not being made.
George Coyne
#37. I do not know how to be of help."
I felt her in my arms. "You are, just by being here," I said. "You help because you understand. No other person has ever understood me like you do." I held her close. "You understand me, and I get you.
Tillie Cole
#38. While extroverts commonly feel loneliness when others are absent, introverts can feel most lonely when others are present, because ours is the aching loneliness of not being known or understood.
Adam S. McHugh
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. Human is very odd living being. I have not understood anything so far.
Shankar Lamichhane
#47. 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
#49. 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
#50. Being understood is not the most essential thing in life.
Jodie Foster
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. It seemed to me he was well rid of Maureen, if she really was disturbing him to the extent that it appeared; but being judicious about other people's love affairs is easy, often merely a sign one has not understood their force or complexity.
Anthony Powell
#54. Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself the soul being unable to become virgin again and not having energy enough to cast itself out again into the ocean of another s soul.
James Joyce
#55. This did not seem to reassure Nico.
"I don't like being in the dark," he muttered.
An odd complaint for a child of Hades, but I understood what he meant.
Rick Riordan
#56. In Buddhism, compassion always goes with wisdom. Compassion without wisdom is not understood to be true compassion, and wisdom without compassion is not true wisdom.
Masao Abe
#57. Self-esteem and identity are very fragile things. I think a lot of times, those are the motivations for why people do take their own lives - not being seen, not being recognized, not being loved, not feeling supported, not feeling understood.
Nate Parker
#58. The motto is, focus on understanding, not on being understood.
Thomas D. Zweifel
#59. With him being so charming, and so perfect, so heart-achingly beautiful, but tarnished in all of the right places, and in all of the ways that I understood so well, how could I not love him?
R.K. Lilley
#60. It's characteristic of democracy that majority rule is understood as being effective not only in politics but also in thinking. In thinking, of course, the majority is always wrong.
Joseph Campbell
#61. We clung to each other with a kind of desperate longing...I never understood exactly what it was, not until I became a hexagenarian. It was that hope of hope that flows between kindred spirits and had little to do with being related by blood.
Keewaydinoquay Peschel
#62. Because I've overcome the vanity and pride of being different. I've understood that they are a pitiful defense against being different. Because I've understood that the sun shines differently when something changes, but I'm not the axis of those changes.
Andrzej Sapkowski
#63. Is this love - this easy generosity, this sense of being understood at last, of not having to pretend?
J.M. Coetzee
#64. Every civilization:
Hindu, Buddhist, Confucianist, Christian, Jewish and Muslim, all of them understood that LEARNING was to make a BETTER HUMAN BEING, LEARNING was NOT to MAKE MORE MONEY;
It was to make a BETTER HUMAN BEING.
Hamza Yusuf
#65. Golf is not my priority. I would hope people see me as a Christian man who loved his family, who loved being in the heat of competition and sometimes succeeded at it; who understood that golf was his job and that he was very lucky to play it for a living.
Zach Johnson
#66. What it would be like to be separated from all these things he did not know, but the more he dwelled on it the more he understood that it was not so much fear of being separated that he felt as sadness at the idea of parting.
Anuk Arudpragasam
