Quotes about Understanding

He stood looking straight at her. Their understanding was too offensively intimate, because they had never said a word to each other.

He could not condemn them without understanding; and he could not understand. Did he like them? No, he thought; he had wanted to like them, which was not the same. He had wanted it in the name of some unstated potentiality which he had once expected to see in any human being. He felt nothing for them now, nothing but the merciless zero of indifference, not even the regret of a loss.

She realized that she had always felt a sense of light-hearted relaxation in his presence and known that he shared it. He was the only man she knew to whom she could speak without strain or effort. This, she thought, was a mind she respected, an adversary worth matching.

When Helen's father compliments Annie on the fact that she has taught Helen the rudiments of discipline, Annie, discouraged, answers: ". . . to do nothing but obey is—no gift, obedience without understanding is a—blindness, too.

Its the critic's job to interpret the artist, even to the artist himself.

The men who now sat in front of his desk had been taught that the law of causality was a superstition and that one had to deal with the situation of the moment without considering its cause.

Have you felt it too? Have you seen how your best friends love everything about you — except the things that count? And your most important is nothing to them; nothing, not even a sound they can recognize.

We think of faith as a source of comfort and understanding but find our expressions of faith sowing division; we believe ourselves to be a tolerant people even as racial, religious, and cultural tensions roil the landscape. And instead of resolving these tensions or mediating these conflicts, our politics fans them, exploits them,and drives us further apart.

Where there is no experience the wise man is silent.

Religious freedom doesn't mean you can force others to live by your own beliefs.

God sees the world through the eyes of those most oppressed.

What matters is how well we have loved.