"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."
— Søren Kierkegaard

"Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less."
— Marie Curie

"Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it isn't so."
— Lemony Snicket (The Blank Book)

"Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves."
— Carl Gustav Jung

"The funny thing about facing imminent death is that it really snaps everything else into perspective."
— James Patterson (The Angel Experiment)

"None of us can choose where we shall love..."
— Susan Kay (Phantom)

"Just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"One of the tasks of true friendship is to listen compassionately and creatively to the hidden silences. Often secrets are not revealed in words, they lie concealed in the silence between the words or in the depth of what is unsayable between two people."
— John O'Donohue (Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom)

"Only the development of compassion and understanding for others can bring us the tranquility and happiness we all seek."
— Dalai Lama XIV

"The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter."
— Malcolm Gladwell (Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking)

"Don't you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn't developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don't expect to see."
— Douglas Adams (Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency)

"Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic"
— Frank Herbert (Dune)

"When you were in love, you were capable of learning everything and of knowing things you had never dared even to think, because love was the key to understanding all of the mysteries."
— Paulo Coelho (Brida)

"the buddhists say there are 149 ways to god. i'm not looking for god, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. "
— jeanette winterson (sexing the cherry)

"Because God is never cruel, there is a reason for all things. We must know the pain of loss; because if we never knew it, we would have no compassion for others, and we would become monsters of self-regard, creatures of unalloyed self-interest. The terrible pain of loss teaches humility to our prideful kind, has the power to soften uncaring hearts, to make a better person of a good one."
— Dean Koontz (The Darkest Evening of the Year)

"If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in."
— Frederick Buechner (Whistling in the Dark: An ABC Theologized)

"…she, with her affection and her gaiety, had been largely responsible for him having rediscovered the meaning of life, her love had driven him to the far corners of the Earth, because he needed to be rich enough to buy some land and live in peace with her for the rest of their days. It was his utter confidence in this fragile creature, that had made him fight with honor, because he knew that after a battle he could forget all the horrors of war in her arms, and that, despite all the women he had known, only there in her arms could he close his eyes and sleep like a child."
— Paulo Coelho (Brida)

"Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,
Men were deceivers ever;
One foot in sea, and one on shore,
To one thing constant never.
Then sigh not so,
But let them go,
And be you blith and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into Hey nonny, nonny.

Sing no more ditties, sing no mo
Of dumps so dull and heavy;
The fraud of men was ever so,
Since summer first was leavy.
Then sigh not so,
But let them go,
And be you blith and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into Hey nonny, nonny."
— William Shakespeare (Much Ado about Nothing)

"Love allows understanding to dawn, and understanding is precious. Where you are understood, you are at home. Understanding nourishes belonging. When you really feel understood, you feel free to release yourself into the trust and shelter of the other person's soul."
— John O'Donohue (Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom)

"…she eventually forgave him, because she understood him."
— Whitney Otto (How to Make an American Quilt)

"We sat in the car
& the night dropped
down until the
only sounds were
the crickets &
the dance of our voices

& for a moment
the world became
small enough to
roll back & forth
between us."
— Brian Andreas (Hearing Voices - Collected Stories & Drawings)

"If you understood everything I said, you’d be me"
— Miles Davis

"People talk about how wonderful the world seems to children, and that's true enough. But children think they will grow into it and understand it, and I know very well that I will not, and would not if I had a dozen lives."
— Marilynne Robinson (Gilead)

"You will learn most things by looking, but reading gives understanding. Reading will make you free."
— Paul Rand

"It is hard for a free fish to understand what is happening to a hooked one."
— Karl A. Menninger

"Evil was created to teach us how to do Good things better."
— Mang

"We now understand that higher-level thinking is more likely to occur in the brain of a student who is emotionally secure than in the brain of a student who is scared, upset, anxious, or stressed."
— Mawhinney and Sagan

"These short stories are vast structures existing mostly in the subconscious of our cultural history. They will live with the reader long after the words have been translated into ideas and dreams. That's because a good short story crosses the borders of our nations and our prejudices and our beliefs. A good short story asks a question that can't be answered in simple terms. And even if we come up with some understanding, years later, while glancing out of a window, the story still has the potential to return, to alter right there in our mind and change everything."
— Walter Mosley (The Best American Short Stories 2003)

"At the conclusion of all our studies we must try once again to experience the human soul as soul, and not just as a buzz of bioelectricity; the human will as will, and not just a surge of hormones; the human heart not as a fibrous, sticky pump, but as the metaphoric organ of understanding. We need not believe in them as metaphysical entities -- they are as real as the flesh and blood they are made of. But we must believe in them as entities; not as analyzed fragments, but as wholes made real by our contemplation of them, by the words we use to talk of them, by the way we have transmuted them to speech. We must stand in awe of them as unassailable, even though they are dissected before our eyes."
— Melvin Konner

"It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them."
— Pierre Beaumarchais

"Mama said it's probably because of Suzanne, and that you are never the same after a child dies. That made me wonder what she was like before Clover died, because I don't think I really knew my own mother until I had children, and if she was different before, I don't remember."
— Nancy E. Turner (These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901 : A Novel)

"We must make haste then, not only because we are daily nearer to death, but also because the conception of things and the understanding of them cease first."
— Marcus Aurelius

"The vainglory of wishing to understand is dangerous, immoral and, above all, old-fashioned. The modern way – perhaps the final way - is to say: Go forward, without knowing why, as quickly as possible, towards an unknown goal! To act and think are opposites which identify one only in the Absolute. To accomplish all one's movements – of the head, the arms, the legs – without ever quite attaining the status of a puppet, but with a certainty that gives one a feeling of rightness: that is what is nowadays held up as the ideal. Be citizens of Universal activity! Forget to be conscious of ourselves! The blind horse gallops without hesitation, not knowing where it is going, not caring where it has been: so let up put out our eyes!"
— Remy de Gourmont

"Erklären heißt verzeihen, erklärt zu werden heißt Verzeihung erlangen [...]"
— J.M. Coetzee (In the Heart of the Country)

"CHOICE NOT CHNACE DETERMINES DESTINY"
— P. RAWAT

"Every other man spoke a language entirely his own, which he had figured out by private thinking; he had his own ideas and peculiar ways. If you wanted to talk about a glass of water, you had to start back with God creating the heavens and earth; the apple; Abraham; Moses and Jesus; Rome; the Middle Ages; gunpowder; the Revolution; back to Newton; up to Einstein; then war and Lenin and Hitler. After reviewing this and getting it all straight again you could proceed to talk about a glass of water. "I'm fainting, please get me a little water." You were lucky even then to make yourself understood. And this happened over and over and over with everyone you met. You had to translate and translate, explain and explain, back and forth, and it was the punishment of hell itself not to understand or be understood."
— Saul Bellow (Seize the Day)

"The schematicism by which our understanding deals with the phenomenal world ... is a skill so deeply hidden in the human soul that we shall hardly guess the secret trick that Nature here employs."
— Immanuel Kant (Kritik der reinen Vernunft)

"It is not for you to say - you Englishmen, who have conquered your freedom so long ago, that you have conveniently forgotten what blood you shed, and what extremities you proceeded to in the conquering - it is not for you to say how far the worst of all exasperations may, or may not, carry the maddened men of an enslaved nation. The iron that has entered into our souls has gone too deep for you to find it. Leave the refugee alone! Laugh at him, distrust him, open your eyes in wonder at the secret self which smolders in him, sometimes under the every-day respectability and tranquility of a man like me - sometimes under the grinding poverty, the fierce squalor, of men less lucky, less pliable, less patient than I am - but judge us not. In the time of your first Charles you might have done us justice - the long luxury of your freedom has made you incapable of doing us justice now. "
— Wilkie Collins (The Woman in White)

"An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Sweedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences. "
— Edith Wharton