Quotes about understanding

Man know much more than he understands.

— Alfred Adler

Yearn to understand first and to be understood second.

— Beca Lewis

Seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.

— St. Augustine

We never understand how little we need in this world until we know the loss of it.

— Sir James M. Barrie

The world only goes round by misunderstanding.

— Charles Baudelaire

To understand is to perceive patterns.

— Sir Isaiah Berlin

Understanding brings control.

— Bonewitz

Perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.

— Andre Breton

If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.

— Pearl S. Buck

The key to why things change is the key to everything.

— James E. Burke

A blind man knows he cannot see, and is glad to be led, though it be by a dog; but he that is blind in his understanding, which is the worst blindness of all, believes he sees as the best, and scorns a guide.

— Samuel Butler

No person was every rightly understood until they had been first regarded with a certain feeling, not of tolerance, but of sympathy.

— Thomas Carlyle

If you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

People in high life are hardened to the wants and distresses of mankind as surgeons are to their bodily pains.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

It has taken me all my life to understand it is not necessary to understand everything.

— Rene Coty

Seek first to understand and then to be understood.

— Stephen R. Covey

Nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first known.

— Leonardo Da Vinci

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.

— Leonardo Da Vinci

I started out with nothing. I still have most of it.

— Michael Davis

I want my boys to have an understanding of people's emotions, their insecurities, people's distress, and their hopes and dreams.

— Princess of Wales Diana

I understand people's suffering, people's pain, more than you will every know yourself.

— Princess of Wales Diana

If I am to care for people in hospital I really must know every aspect of their treatment and to understand their suffering.

— Princess of Wales Diana

The fact that you are willing to say, I do not understand, and it is fine, is the greatest understanding you could exhibit.

— Wayne Dyer

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

— Albert Einstein

No man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

You don't need strength to let go of something. What you really need is understanding.

— Guy Finley

There are three things I have loved but never understood. Art, music and women.

— Bernard Le Bovier Fontenelle

It is better to understand a little than to misunderstand a lot.

— Anatole France

In the long course of history, having people who understand your thought is much greater security than another submarine.

— J. William Fulbright

If you don't understand yourself you don't understand anybody else.

— Nikki Giovanni

Whatever you cannot understand, you cannot possess.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

To know someone here or there with whom you can feel there is understanding in spite of distances or thoughts expressed -- That can make life a garden.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The man of understanding finds everything laughable.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

So long as you live and work, you will be misunderstood; to that you must resign yourself once and for all. Be silent!

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The motto should not be: Forgive one another; rather understand one another.

— Emma Goldman

Before we can forgive one another, we have to understand one another.

— Emma Goldman

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

The thing is plain. All that men really understand, is confined to a very small compass; to their daily affairs and experience; to what they have an opportunity to know, and motives to study or practice. The rest is affectation and imposture.

— William Hazlitt

Understanding is nothing else than conception caused by speech.

— Thomas Hobbes

When I want to understand what is happening today or try to decide what will happen tomorrow, I look back.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

A clear understanding of negative emotions dismisses them.

— Vernon Howard

We are slaves to whatever we don't understand

— Vernon Howard

He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.

— Elbert Hubbard

A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really understand them is bad morals.

— Henry James

Sir, I have found you an argument; but I am not obliged to find you an understanding.

— Samuel Johnson

A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

— Franz Kafka

There is a great difference between knowing and understanding: you can know a lot about something and not really understand it.

— Charles F. Kettering

It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. Human understanding has vulgarly occupied itself with nothing but understanding, but if it would only take the trouble to understand itself at the same time it would simply have to posit the paradox.

— Søren Kierkegaard

Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill-will.

— King Jr. Martin Luther

No one is going to turn down a good meal because he does not understand the digestive mechanism.

— V. I. Klassen

The guru, if he is gifted, reads the story as any bilingual person might. He does not translate-he understands.

— Sheldon Kopp

When we talk about understanding, surely it takes place only when the mind listens completely -- the mind being your heart, your nerves, your ears- when you give your whole attention to it.

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

The power of intuitive understanding will protect you from harm until the end of your days.

— Lao-Tzu

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.

— Harper Lee

If you want truly to understand something, try to change it.

— Kurt Lewin

The improvement of understanding is for two ends: first, our own increase of knowledge; secondly, to enable us to deliver that knowledge to others.

— John Locke

Folks never understand the folks they hate.

— James Russell Lowell

When a man begins to understand himself he begins to live. When he begins to live he begins to understand his fellow men.

— Norvin Mcgranahan

To understand one woman is not necessarily to understand any other woman.

— John Stuart Mill

And, most important, we have to shift our understanding of ourselves as separate individuals, each seeking our own welfare, to an understanding of how we fit into social, biological, and physical environments.

— Robert E. Ornstein

Understanding can overcome any situation, however mysterious or insurmountable it may appear to be.

— Norman Vincent Peale

What we do not understand, we cannot control.

— Charles Reich

Understanding is a two-way street.

— Eleanor Roosevelt

I still understand a few words in life, but I no longer think they make a sentence.

— Jean Rostand

The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilized men.

— Bertrand Russell

If you understand, things are just as they are; if you do not understand, things are just as they are.

— Zen Saying

Return to the root and you will find the meaning.

— Seng-Ts'an

Just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand.

— Homer Simpson

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

— Upton Sinclair

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.

— Baruch (Benedict de) Spinoza

The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.

— Baruch (Benedict de) Spinoza

We can chart our future clearly and wisely only when we know the path which has led to the present.

— Adlai E. Stevenson

Where I am not understood, it shall be concluded that something very useful and profound is couched underneath.

— Jonathan Swift

We shall see but little way if we require to understand what we see. How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding! How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile!

— Henry David Thoreau

Everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.

— Count Leo Tolstoy

Tis better to understand, than to be understood.

— St. Francis of Assisi

Many a man would rather you heard his story than granted his request.

— Source Unknown

The key to understanding others is to first understand yourself

— Source Unknown

UNDERSTANDING does not necessarily mean AGREEMENT.

— Source Unknown

Better to understand a little than to misunderstand a lot.

— Source Unknown

It is not the language but the speaker that we want to understand.

— Veda Upanishads

Furious activity is no substitute for understanding.

— H. H. Williams

To understand possible means to understand impossible.

— Dejan Stojanovic

Pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

— Kahlil Gibran

Nothing is easier than to denounce the evil doer; Nothing more difficult than understanding him.

— Fyodor Dostoevsky

In youth we learn; in age we understand.

— Marie E. Eschenbach

Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?

— Philip Roth

If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.

— Carl Jung