Knowing Others Quotes

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Criticizing people, winding them up, making idiots of them or fooling them doesn't make people with autism laugh. What makes us smile from the inside is seeing something beautiful, or a memory makes us laugh. This generally happens when there's nobody watching us. And at night, on our own, we might burst out laughing underneath the duvet, or roar with later in an empty room ... When we don't need to think about other people or anything else, that's when we wear our aural expressions.”
― Naoki Higashida, The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism

“Sometimes it’s only in the ecstasy of unrepressed movement that we may enter the stillness of our authentic selves. In such sacred moments, the world seems to be in step. This is why the idea of finding love across the dance floor endure — symbolizing that, when we know the true rhythm of our heart, we know the other.”
― Alexandra Katehakis, Mirror of Intimacy: Daily Reflections on Emotional and Erotic Intelligence

“To say we know a person is to write that person off.”
― Yiyun Li, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life

“To accept one's past - one's history - is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“Not ordinarily do men achieve this balance of opposites. The idealists are not usually realistic, and the realists are not usually idealistic. The militant are not generally known to be passive, nor the passive to be militant. Seldom are the humble self-assertive, or the self assertive humble. ...truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis that reconciles the two.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love

“[When explaining over reactions to small mistakes] I get swallowed up in the moment, and I can't tell the right response from the wrong response. All I know is that I have to get out of the situation as soon as I can, so I don't drown. To get away, I'll do anything. Crying, screaming and throwing things, hitting out even... Finally, finally, I'll calm down and come back to myself. Then I see no sign of the tsunami attack--only the wreckage I've made. And when I see that, I hate myself. I just hate myself.”
― Naoki Higashida, The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism

“It is logical to say that ignorance seems to be the root cause of all human suffering.”
― Kat Lahr, Anatomy Of Illumination

“In daily life we never understand each other, neither complete clairvoyance nor complete confessional exists. We know each other approximately, by external signs, and these serve well enough as a basis for society and even for intimacy. But people in a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist wishes; their inner as well as their outer life can be exposed. And this is why they often seem more definite than characters in history, or even our own friends; we have been told all about them that can be told; even if they are imperfect or unreal they do not contain any secrets, whereas our friends do and must, mutual secrecy being one of the conditions of life upon this globe.”
― E.M. Forster

“Hatred is prevalent on this earth because it requires no real effort, unlike the investment it takes to genuinely understand a person.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Slaying Dragons: Quotes, Poetry, & a few Short Stories for Every Day of the Year

“Of all the people I have ever known you are the only one I don't know.”
― William Henry Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago: A History of My Early Life

“It isn’t the words we speak that make us who we are. Or even the deeds we do. It is the secrets buried in our hearts.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Secrets Between Us

“To know a very different person from ourselves is a great luck for us!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“To know people really, you must catch them in their very unhappy times! If they treat you well, then you can be sure that they are good people!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Sometimes your gaze alone scares me. Sometimes I've never seen you before. I no longer know what you're doing here, in this popular seaside resort, in this dull, crowded season, where you are even more alone than in your regional capital.

The better to kill you, perhaps, or to drive you away, I don't know. I sometimes manage to feel I've never seen you before. That I don't know you, to the point of horror. That I have no idea why you're here, what you want from me, or what will become of you. Becoming is the only subject we never, ever broach.

You must not know what you're doing here either, with this woman who is already old, mad with writing.

Maybe this is just normal, maybe it's the same all over; it's nothing, you came simply because you were desperate, as you are every day of your life. And also during certain summers at certain times of day or night when the sun quits the sky and slips into the sea, every evening, always, you cannot help wanting to die. This I know.

I see the two of us lost in similar natures. I can sometimes be overwhelmed by tenderness for the kind of people we are. Unstable, they say, a bit nutty. 'People who never go to the movies, or the theater, or parties.' Leftists are like that, you know, they have no clue how to enjoy life. Cannes makes them sick and so do the grand hotels of Morocco. Movies and theaters, it's all the same.”
― Marguerite Duras, Yann Andréa Steiner

“How well do we actually know ourselves? Can we dare to say that we really know someone, like really, really know them?”
― Nico J. Genes

“Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father's face, for behind your father's face as it is today are all those other faces which were his.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“Every heartbeat a syllable for words I can’t speak, to explain what I want from him. What I want from myself. To know and be known, totally and completely. To be someone worth knowing.”
― Ryan Galloway, Biome

“The only way to truly know someone is by being with them, by conversation.”
― Eric Overby

“Without knowing the world of others, your own world will never get rich!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“With the world as with people, you know only the tiny percentage you pay close attention to.”
― Steve Toutonghi, Side Life

“How many people know anything of either their lover’s true history or their desires? Truly know, I mean, not merely suspect.”
― Yasmine Millett, The Erotic Notebooks