“People in high life are hardened to the wants and distresses of mankind as surgeons are to their bodily pains.”
“The guru, if he is gifted, reads the story as any bilingual person might. He does not translate-he understands.”
“The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.”
“So long as you live and work, you will be misunderstood; to that you must resign yourself once and for all. Be silent!”
“In the long course of history, having people who understand your thought is much greater security than another submarine.”
“When a man begins to understand himself he begins to live. When he begins to live he begins to understand his fellow men.”
“If I am to care for people in hospital I really must know every aspect of their treatment and to understand their suffering.”
“The fact that you are willing to say, ''I do not understand, and it is fine,'' is the greatest understanding you could exhibit.”
“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.”
“There is a great difference between knowing and understanding: you can know a lot about something and not really understand it.”
“I want my boys to have an understanding of people's emotions, their insecurities, people's distress, and their hopes and dreams.”
“No person was every rightly understood until they had been first regarded with a certain feeling, not of tolerance, but of sympathy.”
“The improvement of understanding is for two ends: first, our own increase of knowledge; secondly, to enable us to deliver that knowledge to others.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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!”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“If you want truly to understand something, try to change it.”