To Understand And To Be Understood Quotes

#1. One of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

#2. 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

#3. Postmodernism does not help us understand good art. It encourages art that can be easily understood and throws in something catchy to cover the loss of mystery.

Walter Darby Bannard

#4. they play fast and loose with both historical fact and traditional religious interpretation in order to understand their past as they believe it must be understood

Mary R. Habeck

#5. We are born to believe
We can't change a thing
We can't, and we never could.
But before you believe
The things you believe
You must understand
To be understood.

John C. O'Callaghan

#6. The truth is lived before it is understood. It must be fought for, tested, and appropriated. Truth is the way ... Anyone will easily understand it if he just gives himself to it.

Soren Kierkegaard

#7. Everyone, he went on, speaks a language he does not understand, but which now and then is understood by others. That is enough to permit one to exist and at least to be misunderstood.

Thomas Bernhard

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. You can take Hollywood for granted like I did, or you can dismiss it with the contempt we reserve for what we don't understand. It can be understood too, but only dimly and in flashes. Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#13. She was sleeping on the bed like a novel that is yet to be read and he sat on the floor, reading her, moving his fingers through her hair and staring at her face like she was magic that none ever understood.

Akshay Vasu

#14. I've never understood activity holidays since we seem to have far too much activity in our daily lives as it is. Find a culture where loafing is the order of the day and where they don't understand our need to be constantly doing things. Find somewhere you can have a hammock holiday.

Tom Hodgkinson

#15. The doctrine of the Church cannot be fully understood unless it is tested by mind and feelings, by intellect and emotions, by every power of the investigator. Every Church member is expected to understand the doctrine of the Church intelligently. There is no place in the Church for blind adherence.

John Andreas Widtsoe

#16. The most important thing is that we need to be understood. We need someone to be able to listen to us and to understand us. Then we will suffer less.

Nhat Hanh

#17. But to be understood is not a human right. Even to understand oneself is not a human right.

Iris Murdoch

#18. To understand and be understood is to be at peace

Kamand Kojouri

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. I've got people I want to understand and people I want to be understood by.

Haruki Murakami

#22. Real, sturdy, lasting peace, peace that doesn't rise and fall with circumstances, isn't to be found in picking apart your life until you have understood all of the components. You will never understand it all because God, for your good and his glory, keeps some of it shrouded in mystery.

Paul David Tripp

#23. When people can't use you, they ridicule what you represent. I was lucky that I understood that, because when one does not understand that, it is very easy to be broken and to be subdued.

Wangari Maathai

#24. My uncle said physically disciplining children fell into the same category as hitting an animal, neither has the emotional or intellectual capacity to understand the action on any level other than pain and fear. He said discipline is a concept that can only be understood by adults.

Fabian Black

#25. When we listen with the intent to understand others, rather than with the intent to reply, we begin true communication and relationship building. Opportunities to then speak openly and to be understood come much more naturally and easily.

Stephen Covey

#26. I believe you should seek to understand and then be understood.

Tony Gaskins

#27. Nature is made in such a way as to be able to be understood. Or perhaps I should put it-more correctly-the other way around, and say that we are made in such a way as to be able to understand Nature.

Werner Heisenberg

#28. Truth possesses within herself a penetrating force, unknown alike to error and falsehood. I say 'truth' and you understand my meaning. For the beautiful words truth and justice need not to be defined in order to be understood in their true sense.

Anatole France

#29. 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

#30. To understand why dictators have a problem with making peace - or at least a genuine peace - the link between the nature of a regime and its external behavior must be understood.

Natan Sharansky

#31. The most basic of all human needs is the need to understand and be understood. The best way to understand people is to listen to them.

Ralph G. Nichols

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

Unanimous

#33. 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

#34. 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

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

Elie Wiesel

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. Conservatives and liberals understand the Christian faith as a set of ideas because, so understood, Christianity seems to be a set of beliefs assessable to anyone upon reflection.

Stanley Hauerwas

#39. One of humanity's prime drives is to understand and be understood. All other living creatures are designed for highly specialized tasks. Man seems unique as the comprehensive comprehender
and co-ordinator of local universe affairs.

R. Buckminster Fuller

#40. You can be told that reading Victor Hugo will sap your will to live, but you can't understand what that means until you've read a few chapters and your eyes have glazed over and someone has to revive you with a defibrillator. Sophie and the six crewmen might have understood

Kevin Hearne

#41. I'm afraid of not having enough time," she clarified. "Not enough time to understand people, how they really are, or to be understood myself. I'm afraid of the quick judgments and mistakes that everybody makes. You can't fix them without time. I'm afraid of seeing snapshots instead of movies.

Ann Brashares

#42. Music is powerful. It sets the mind and body and soul free in a way that I've need fully been able to understand. Maybe because it's not meant to be understood. It's simply meant to be experienced.

Jacqueline E. Smith

#43. 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

#44. Use anything you can think of to understand and be understood, and you'll discover the creativity that connects you with others.

Martha Beck

#45. If we were to name the most powerful assumption of all, which leads one on and on in an attempt to understand life, it is that all things are made of atoms, and that everything that living things do can be understood in terms of the jigglings and wigglings of atoms.

Richard Feynman

#46. He said, You know what Oscar Wilde said - women are meant to be loved, not understood. Applies to both of them, darling. And I nodded, although it seemed to me that I was going to be a woman too and I would like it if someone thought they should understand me.

Amy Bloom

#47. If human language, with its logic, is the way God has given us to understand the world, then the Torah must be understood in that same language and with that same logic.

David Novak

#48. We're forever teetering on the brink of the unknowable, and trying to understand what can't be understood.

Isaac Asimov

#49. On the road halfway between faith and criticism stands the inn of reason. reason is faith in what can be understood without faith, but it's still a faith, since to understand presupposes that there's something understandable.

Fernando Pessoa

#50. And to understand this, I think this is a most important point where I would like always to be understood what we do with the New York Philharmonic. That the meaning of the music is number one.

Kurt Masur

#51. The major job was getting people to understand that they had something within their power that they could use, and it could only be used if they understood what was happening and how group action could counter violence.

Ella Baker

#52. Action can only be understood in relation to place; only by staying in place can the imagination conceive or understand action in terms of consequence, of cause and effect. The meaning of action in time is inseparable from its meaning in place.

Wendell Berry

#53. A person talks in such generalities that everyone can understand him and it's considered to be some deep philosophy . However, I would like to be very rather more special and I would like to be understood in an honest way, rather than in a vague way.

Richard P. Feynman

#54. My instinct told me that she didn't want me to understand. What she felt and lived with couldn't be shared or understood by anyone else.

James Anderson

#55. You're saying the mysteries are worth examining, even if they're too big to be understood. That maybe they're bound to be too big to understand, but that doesn't take anything away from them, and in fact just adds to their beauty.

Lauren Myracle

#56. Those who have suffered much are like those who know many languages; they have learned to understand and be understood by all.

Sophie Swetchine

#57. Man created language to be understood. It should be normal to understand what people convey to us. Fear, ulterior motives, and closed mindedness are the enemies of understanding.

John Fairclough

#58. The poem and the drama is not the experience except as we identify ourselves with it, and know what it feels like to have it. What distinguishes literature is that it cannot be understood unless we understand what it is like to be human.

Jacob Bronowski