To Be Understood Quotes

#1. The source of magic in this world is more mysterious than all the explanations that sorcerers and wizards have given for it, and it is more prevalent than can be understood by those who live according to the constricted form of reason so prevalent in our time.

Dean Koontz

#2. I've always understood pornography to be an industry growing ever more granular, appealing to smaller and smaller segments of idiosyncratic perversion.

Drew Nellins Smith

#3. The Olympic dream was born in 2010 during the qualifications to Vancouver. And when I was watching those Olympics from the sidelines, I felt that I wanted to have my Games. I understood that it wouldn't be easy to make them, especially now that in Russia there are a lot of strong girls.

Adelina Sotnikova

#4. My focus on silence is to be understood as an intrinsic part of the body's search for meaning amongst the noisy assaults of everyday life ... What quilts have brought to the viewing of art generally is this intervening layer of silence, of collected thought and concerted attention.

Radka Donnell

#5. If I explained everything maybe he would understand. I needed to be understood.

Michelle Hodkin

#6. Seek first to understand, then and only then to be understood.

Unanimous

#7. To be a true poet is to become God.
I tried to explain this to my friends on Heaven's Gate. 'Piss, shit,' I said. 'Asshole motherfucker, goddamn shit goddamn. Cunt. Pee-pee cunt. Goddamn!'
They shook their heads and smiled, and walked away. Great poets are rarely understood in their own day.

Dan Simmons

#8. Give yourself completely to the act of listening. Beyond the sounds there is something greater, a sacredness that cannot be understood through thought.

Eckhart Tolle

#9. She'd once been appalled to hear of women claiming PMS as a defense for murder. Now she understood. She could happily murder someone today! In fact, she felt like there should be some sort of recognition for her remarkable strength of character that she didn't.

Liane Moriarty

#10. And Juniper had understood, somehow, that in Tom she'd found the person who could balance her, and that more than anything, to fall in love was to be caught, to be saved ...

Kate Morton

#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. In the end, perhaps we should simply imagine a joke; a long joke that's continually retold in an accent too thick and strange to ever be completely understood. Life is that joke my friends. The soul is the punch line.

Tom Robbins

#13. No one book of scripture can be understood by itself, any more than any one part of a tree or member of the body can be understood without reference to the whole of which it is a part.

Charles Hodge

#14. If it's cynical, risky politics that brings a lighted match and a can of gas near the Democratic coalition, it should be named as such, and its consequences understood, and it should become part of the complex calculus we're all building to help us understand these campaigns.

Ezra Klein

#15. To be truly seen and understood - in all our innocence and glory and yes, our brokenness, too - is to be delivered into the spiritual ethers where both seen and seer are healed.

Marianne Williamson

#16. From what I've understood, it's an entirely different world, and it's a tough world to get your foot in the door, but I've always wanted to be a voice of a Disney character.

Sean Maher

#17. For according to the outward man, we are in this world, and according to the inward man, we are in the inward world.... Since then we are generated out of both worlds, we speak in two languages, and we must be understood also by two languages.

Jakob Bohme

#18. Everywhere sex is understood to be something females have that males want.

Donald Symons

#19. But spectacular lies don't need to be perfect. They rely less on the liar's skill than on the listener's expectations and wishes. After Mark's dishonesty was exposed, I understood how much I wised that what he had told me had been true.

Siri Hustvedt

#20. Pray that, above all things, the gates of light may be opened to you; for these things cannot be perceived or understood by all, but only by the man to whom God and his Christ have imparted wisdom (Dial. 7, 3).

Pope Benedict XVI

#21. 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

#22. [May] understood people and she let them be whatever way they needed to be. She had faith in every single person she ever met, and this never failed her, for nobody ever disappointed May. Seems people knew she saw the very best of them, and they'd turn that side to her to give her a better look.

Cynthia Rylant

#23. And it made me hurt inside of my bones with sadness. Because in a life that is long and well lived there are sorrows and darkest doldrums that cannot be understood by those who live day to day like it could be any other.

Brian McGreevy

#24. 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

#25. It is true that if care is taken to use only a language that it's understood by graduates in law and economics, you can easily prove that the masses have to be managed from above.

Frantz Fanon

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. Pain is not something to be feared; it is something to be understood.

Pete Egoscue

#30. 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

#31. Is it to be understood that the principles of the Declaration of Independence bear no relation to half of the human race?

Harriet Martineau

#32. And understood that rage could be quiet. Could be soft. Rage didn't have to be a killer.

Benjamin Alire Saenz

#33. A few months ago, I had the pleasure of actually visiting the Playboy Mansion. I saw the peacocks, fed grapes to the monkeys, and even braved the fabled Grotto. After seeing the estate, I understood why anyone would be reluctant to leave.

Diablo Cody

#34. 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

#35. I've always understood the two to be intertwined: sexuality and spirituality. That never changed.

Prince

#36. I have never doubted that religious phenomena are only to be understood on the pattern of the individual neurotic symptoms familiar to us.

Sigmund Freud

#37. If the brain was simple enough to be understood - we would be too simple to understand it!

Minsky M.A.

#38. The new human type cannot be properly understood without awareness of what he is continuously exposed to from the world of things about him, even in his most secret innervations.

Theodor Adorno

#39. When, in the works of Lacan, Deleuze and Althusser, the nonsense machine began to crank out its impenetrable sentences, of which nothing could be understood except that they all had "capitalism" as their target, it looked as though Nothing had at last found its voice.

Roger Scruton

#40. Art is not there simply to be understood ... It is more the sense of an indication or suggestion.

Joseph Beuys

#41. You can understand why a system would seek information - but why in hell does it offer information? Why do we strive to be understood? Why is a refusal to accept communication so painful?

James Tiptree Jr.

#42. What the end of the carnage of World War II meant to those who remember it, can never be forgotten, but to all those who don't, its meaning can never be fully understood!

Calvin Coolidge

#43. I think that's when I understood that you only ruined my life because my life needed ruining. Because the life you rejected demanded that I spend all my time telling my daughter to be less and my son to be more.

Courtney Milan

#44. I have never understood why it is called losing a child. No parent is that careless. We all know exactly where our sons and daughters are; we just don't necessarily want them to be there

Jodi Picoult

#45. I perceived that the 'thing' and the 'idea' were taken to be equivalents of feeling, and understood the lie of the world of will and idea. Is the milk bottle the symbol of milk?

Kazimir Malevich

#46. 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

#47. I sent my story to Hannah the way people pray - casting my plea into the ether. A plea to be understood. Looking for the signs.

M. Pierce

#48. 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

#49. But there is an overarching passion that keeps me alive. That is love, understood as a condition in which I can be an inspiration, make someone feel happy and special, and in turn, feel understood and driven. I function better if I am in that condition of love, and I try to cultivate that daily.

Giovanni Frazzetto

#50. The art of writing is to explain the complications of the human soul with the simplicity that can be universally understood.

Alan Sillitoe

#51. As population susceptibilities are better understood, we will be in a better position than we are in today to make informed decisions about risk management.

Samuel Wilson

#52. My problem with the traditional acting method was that I never understood what you were supposed to be thinking about when you're onstage.

Tina Fey

#53. Beautiful. Jules once thought he'd understood what the word meant. He now believed it overused. Some word needed to be kept in reserve for the rare, the arresting, the surprising ... the magical. Or a new one invented.

Julie Anne Long

#54. Here again is one grand element of a preacher's success. He must labour by all means to be understood. It was a wise saying of Archbishop Usher, To make easy things seem hard is every man's work; but to make hard things easy is the work of a great preacher.

J.C. Ryle

#55. If you want to be loved, LOVE. If you want to be understood, UNDERSTAND. If you want peace, MAKE PEACE. If you want light, LIGHT. If you want to be seen, SHINE. If you want to be heard, LISTEN.

Abhishek Kumar

#56. Neurosis can be understood best as the battle between tendencies within an individual; deep character analysis leads, if successful, to the progressive solution.

Erich Fromm

#57. 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

#58. No reform ever came from the bottom, and it was always people who understood how the ruling class worked who turned out to be the reformers.

Gore Vidal

#59. 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

#60. My God was never happiness, but to understand and be understood.

Elie Wiesel

#61. The investigation of the rights of the slave has led me to a better understanding of my own. I have found the anti-slavery cause to be ... the school in which human rights are more fully investigated and better understood and taught than in any other.

Angelina Grimke

#62. 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

#63. What I've understood is that to be funny is not my job. To see funny is my job.

Anna D. Shapiro

#64. The boys he met at Annandale only understood one kind of woman. They needed to be coddled and cooed over as their own mothers had done their whole lives.

Thomm Quackenbush

#65. The motif must always be set down in a simple way, easily grasped and understood by the beholder. By the elimination of superfluous detail, the spectator should be led along the road that the artist indicates to him, and from the first be made to notice what the artist has felt.

Alfred Sisley

#66. 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

#67. What has happened to us has happened to everyone or only us; if to everyone, then it's no novelty, and if only to us, then it won't be understood. From, The Book of Disquiet

Fernando Pessoa

#68. Until it's understood to involve justice for those in poverty, a future for generations yet unborn, and a commitment to the rest of creation, it's unlikely we'll be able to overcome the status quo.

Bill McKibben

#69. 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

#70. Now I was, as they said, become godly; now I was become a right honest man. But oh! when I understood these were their words and opinions of me, it pleased me mighty well. For, though as yet I was nothing but a poor painted hypocrite, yet, I loved to be talked of as one that was truly godly.

John Bunyan

#71. And she realized everything one does is just another effort to be understood by someone a little bit more.

Vatsal Surti

#72. Mr. Hitchcock taught me everything about cinema. It was thanks to him that I understood that murder scenes should be shot like love scenes and love scenes like murder scenes.

Grace Kelly

#73. In short, dozens of conflicting, truncated impressions were already teasing to be understood, but the wisest course seemed to me to keep them to myself so long as I didn't begin to know what they added up to.

Philip Roth

#74. Some people think to be strong is to never feel pain. However the strongest people are the ones that have felt pain, understood it, accepted it and learned from it.

Charlotte Dawson

#75. Just the inexplicable wants to be understood within the nonsense of emptiness that belongs to this world of illusion.

Sorin Cerin

#76. Children are meant to understand compassion and comfort because they have received compassion and comfort - and this should be in the family setting. A family should be a place where comfort is experienced and understood, so that the people are prepared to give comfort to others.

Edith Schaeffer

#77. You seem so far away though you are standing near.
You made me feel alive, but something died I fear.
I really tried to make it out, I wish I understood.
What happened to our love, it used to be so good.

Bjorn Ulvaeus

#78. Some people underestimate how erotic it is to be understood.

Mary Rakow

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. 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

#82. 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

#83. 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

#84. 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

#85. Death is nothing to us, it matters not one jot, since the nature of the mind is understood to be mortal.

Lucretius

#86. 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

#87. Ruth understood a man's character to be more important than youthful romance

Vikki Kestell

#88. I am doing what I want to do - painting pictures people want and understand. I have no burning ambition to create the kind of 'art' which the confused critics praise for its 'plastic significance,' 'fluid lines,' and 'inner awareness,' or 'must be understood on three levels.

Arnold Friberg

#89. As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after.

Arthur Conan Doyle

#90. I think more than anything, people just want to be understood.

Charlize Theron

#91. I can't claim to 'understand' 'Byzantium,' if any dance work can be 'understood,' but whenever I see it, I sense that it's charged with meaning.

Robert Gottlieb

#92. At the bottom of things, most people want to be understood and appreciated.

Gautama Buddha

#93. 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

#94. I thought this life of thoughtful liberalism was my birthright, too. Before I understood that my generation was to be born in interesting times.

Maureen F. McHugh

#95. 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

#96. 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

#97. 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

#98. The deepest hunger of [a child's] human heart is to be understood, for understanding implicitly affirms, validates, recognizes and appreciates the intrinsic worth of another.

Stephen Covey

#99. Life has a peculiar feel when you look back on it that it doesn't have when you're actually living it. It's as though the whole thing were designed to be understood in hindsight, as though you'll never know the meaning of your experiences until you've had enough of them to provide reference.

Donald Miller

#100. The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries is the notion of 'independent existence.' There is no such mode of existence; every entity is to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.

Alfred North Whitehead