Quotes & Sayings About Not Understanding Each Other

After all, everyone may not start with the same financial opportunities; however everyone does start with the choice to live their life with integrity, trust, love, respect,understanding for each other and oneself. — Tasha Hoggatt

We are all each of us riddles, when unknown one to the other. The plain map of human powers and purposes, helps us not at all to thread the labyrinth each individual presents in his involution of feelings, desires and capacities; and we must resemble, in quickness of feeling, instinctive sympathy, and warm benevolence, the lovely daughter of Huntley, before we can hope to judge rightly of the good and virtuous of our fellow-creatures. — Mary Shelley

I think the real understanding comes when we recognize our humanity in each other. That's not just between blacks and whites. That's between all religions as well. — Phylicia Rashad

The right understanding of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other. — Franz Kafka

There is an Arabic proverb which says that "Peace comes from understanding, not agreement." Agreements are more easily broken than made; but understanding never. It is urgent, therefore, and in the interest of peace, that there be better understanding among nations. As people we are one, seeking the same goal. As nations, we lose each other down the different paths we choose to fulfill our national objectives. that is why we must understand each other better. — King Hussein I

My joy is that there is no such world at all, but that the substance of life is in everyone! There is no reason to be troubled because we are absurd, is there? For we really are: we are absurd, frivolous, we have bad habits, we're bored, we don't know how to look around ourselves, we don't know how to understand, we are all like this, all of us, you, and I, and everyone! And you aren't offended by my telling you straight to your faces that you are absurd? There is the basic stuff of life in your, isn't there? You know, I believe it's sometimes even good to be ridiculous. Yes, much better. People forgive each other more readily and become more humble, we can't understand everything at once, we can't begin with perfection! To reach perfection there must first be much we do not understand. And if we understand too quickly we will probably not understand very well. I tell this to you who have been able to understand so much and - do not understand.'
p. 577 — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I will have a deeper and personal relationship with my life. I will not have a casual fling with my life. I will find peace in that. I want to contribute to the world around me. Casual debauchery is not fulfilling. I want to send good messages and good meanings along the way. The journey is about spreading love and understanding. Not using each other. Not distraction. Tools for presence in life. I want to bond with like-minded people who echo my appreciation and awareness for them. — Hannah Hart

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

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States and China are more likely to view each other as competitors if not adversaries. But the die has not been cast. The best possible outcome is a new understanding that when they cannot cooperate, they will coexist and allow all countries in the Pacific to grow and thrive. — Lee Kuan Yew

What greater prestige can a man like me (not too gifted, but very understanding) have than to have taken a cheap, shoddy and utterly lost kind of writing, and have made of it something that intellectuals claw each other about? — Raymond Chandler

The secular world is the world of history as made by human beings. Human agency is subject to investigation and analysis, which it is the mission of understanding to apprehend, criticize, influence, and judge. Above all, critical thought does not submit to state power or to commands to join in the ranks marching against one or another approved enemy. Rather than the manufactured clash of civilizations, we need to concentrate on the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other, and live together in far more interesting ways than any abridged or inauthentic mode of understanding can allow. But for that kind of wider perception we need time and patient and skeptical inquiry, supported by faith in communities of interpretation that are difficult to sustain in a world demanding instant action and reaction. — Edward W. Said

I believe that we are here for each other, not against each other. Everything comes from an understanding that you are a gift in my life - whoever you are, whatever our differences. — John Denver

We can not communicate with the Lord if we do not communicate with each other. If we want to present ourselves to him, we must take a step towards meeting one another. To do this we must learn the great lesson of forgiveness: we must not let the gnawings of resentment work in our soul but must open our hearts to the magnanimity of listening to others, open our hearts to understanding them, eventually to accepting their apologies, to generously offering our own. — Pope Benedict XVI

Productive collaborations between family and school, therefore, will demand that parents and teachers recognize the critical importance of each other's participation in the life of the child. This mutuality of knowledge, understanding, and empathy comes not only with a recognition of the child as the central purpose for the collaboration but also with a recognition of the need to maintain roles and relationships with children that are comprehensive, dynamic, and differentiated. — Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot

If I don't understand you, I may be angry at you, all the time. We are not capable of understanding each other, and that is the main source of human suffering. — Thich Nhat Hanh

I think that when two people are able to weave that kind of invisible thread of understanding and sympathy between each other, that delicate web, they should not risk tearing it. It is too rare, and it lasts too short a time at best ... — Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher

It's a confusing fucking time in the world today. People still hate as much for color and twice as much for creed. They kill each other for gods they've never met. They hurt their women according to books written by those who might not have known any better. They hate based on biased faith instead of understanding based on accessible fact. — Corey Taylor

When we live with another person, we should help each other transform the internal formations that we have produced in each other. By practicing understanding and loving speech, we can help each other a great deal. Happiness is no longer an individual matter. If the other person is not happy, we will not be happy either. Therefore, to transform the internal formations in the other is to bring about our own happiness as well. A person can create internal formations in her partner, and her partner can do so for her, and if they continue to create knots in each other, one day they'll have no happiness left. A person needs to recognize quickly any newly formed knot inside herself. She should take the time to observe it and, with her partner's help, transform the internal formation. She might say, "Darling, I have an internal formation. Can you please help me?" This is easy when the states of mind of both partners are still light and not loaded with many internal formations. — Thich Nhat Hanh

you leave home and you feel that you forgot something. You "refocus" sought to identify the problem: forgot open gas ? water running? iron into the outlet? In each case, you know that's not the right answer because it does not feel any relief. Finally, the correct answer is accompanied by a "change", a sense of understanding, relieving tension and even feeling good physically. It is, in other words, that "Aha!" Liberating. — Costei Andrew

Many people have failing relationships because they have not really fallen in love with each other, but they have fallen for the mental images they have created of one another. We assume we know our partner, we think about them nonstop, creating many different ideas of who they are, what they like, and how we will be together, then as soon as our partner does something that doesn't fit with our mental image of them, we become sad, upset, confused, or heart broken. Our partner did not cause our suffering; we caused it, through our false perceptions and mental images. — Joseph P. Kauffman

When you have two people who love each other, are happy and gay and really good work is being done by one or both of them, people are drawn to them as surely as migrating birds are drawn at night to a powerful beacon. If the two people were as solidly constructed as the beacon there would be little damage except to the birds. Those who attract people by their happiness and their performance are usually inexperienced. They do not know how not to be overrun and how to go away. They do not always learn about the good, the attractive, the charming, the soon-beloved, the generous, the understanding rich who have no bad qualities and who give each day the quality of a festival and who, when they have passed and taken the nourishment they needed, leave everything deader than the roots of any grass Attila's horses' hooves have ever scoured. — Ernest Hemingway,

Real faith, however, is required to endure this necessary but painful developmental process. As things unfold, sometimes in full view, let us be merciful with each other. We certainly do not criticize hospital patients amid intensive care for looking pale and preoccupied. Why then those recovering from surgery on their souls? No need for us to stare; those stitches will finally come out. And in this hospital, too, it is important for everyone to remember that the hospital chart is not the patient. Extending our mercy to someone need not wait upon our full understanding of their challenges! Empathy may not be appreciated or reciprocated, but empathy is never wasted. — Neal A. Maxwell

Whether the United States is a hegemon, an indispensable power, or an empire at sunset, and whether China or some other rival stands to take its place, may be a debate that consumes international relations. But its terms are not adapted to a world where power is decaying - where unprecedented forms of fracturing are under way within each of these countries and across systems of trade, investment, migration, and culture. Identifying who is up and who is down is less important than understanding what is going on inside those nations, political movements, corporations, and religions that are on the elevator. Who is up and who is down will matter ever less in a world in which those who get to the top don't stay there for long and are able to do less and less with the power they have while there. — Moises Naim

They did not like each other particularly, would never have called one another friend or even have associated under different circumstances, and wherever they were, an argument seemed to lie only a few seconds' journey from them in any given direction.

But something had begun to grow between them as well--a sort of cooperative understanding--and the moments in which this was most obvious were the moments in which one of the two men would forgo his own strongly held way of being and embrace the other's, as if giving a moment of his life to his opposite in tribute. — Gavriel Savit

I is not understanding human beans at all,' the BFG said. 'You is a human bean and you is saying it is grizzling and horrigust for giants to be eating human beans. Right or left?' 'Right,' Sophie said. 'But human beans is squishing each other all the time,' the BFG said. 'They is shootling guns and going up in aerioplanes to drop their bombs on each other's heads every week. Human beans is always killing other human beans.' He was right. Of course he was right and Sophie knew it. She was beginning to wonder whether humans were actually any better than giants. — Roald Dahl

Adultery is the vice of equivocation.
It is not marriage but a mockery of it, a merging that mixes love and dread together like jackstraws. There is no understanding of contentment in adultery ... You belong to each other in what together you've made of a third identity that almost immediately cancels your own. There is a law in art that proves it. Two colors are proven complimentary only when forming that most desolate of all colors
neutral gray. — Alexander Theroux

We have so politicized literature today, pigeonholing people into gay male fiction, lesbian fiction, transgender fiction and then other sub-genres within those. There seems to be a feeling like authors should stay in their own box and not write about anybody else, but the thing is, as a writer, you're constantly writing about things that you yourself haven't personally experienced. We should all be free to write about each other as human beings. Some gay men love reading lesbian novels, some straight women love gay male romance, and that richness of reaching across the boundaries helps us further our understanding of each other. — Patricia Nell Warren

Like life, racial understanding is not something that we find but something that we must create. And so the ability of Negroes and whites to work together, to understand each other, will not be found readymade; it must be created by the fact of contact. — Coretta Scott King

George feels that, even if all this double talk hasn't brought them any closer to understanding each other, the not-understanding, the readiness to remain at cross-purposes, is in itself a kind of intimacy. — Christopher Isherwood

When I was a little girl my understanding of revenge was as simple as the Sunday school proverbs it hid behind. Neat little morality slogans like, do un to others and two wrongs don't make a right. But two wrongs can never make a right because; two wrongs can never equal each other. For the truly wronged real satisfaction can only be found in one of two places, absolute forgiveness or mortal vindication. This is not a story about forgiveness. — Emily Thorne

Can I play?" she asked finally, understanding, even at six, that the timidity of the question invited a single reply. "No." Looking to each other, not to her. She watched them. The orders they barked were low and intimate, running under the sound of the wind. "Can I have a man?" she asked. "No," again, but now their parents on the blanket together looked toward them. — Alice McDermott

Considering what Adam went through to appreciate Eve to the utmost, I wondered how beautiful it is that you and I were created to need each other. The romantic need is just the beginning, because we need our families and we need our friends. In this way, we are made in God's image. Certainly God does not need people in the way you and I do, but He feels a joy at being loved, and He feels a joy at delivering love. It is a stinking thought to realize that, in paradise, a human is incomplete without a host of other people. We are relational indeed. And the Bible, with all its understanding of the relational needs of humans, was becoming more meaningful to me as I turned the pages. God made me, He knows me, He understands me, and He wants community. — Donald Miller

Conversations about money certainly are not sexy, but they should give each of you some clarity and enable you to enter into your marriage with a better understanding of each other and what is important. Work and home responsibilities, joint or separate accounts, budgets, etc. are all subjects which should be discussed. — Laura Wasser

We are not separate. Our sense of separateness is superficial and exist only in the physical dimension. In our human element, we are not separate; we're very much connected. Every other human being is just as precious as we are, and worthy of as much respect and love and consideration. This understanding needs to manifest in our conduct in each moment. This is the part of the Work that will transform you. — A.H. Almaas

In the Garden story, good and evil are found on the same tree, not in separate orchards. Good and evil give meaning and definition to each other. If God, like us, is susceptible to immense pain, He is, like us, the greater in His capacity for happiness. The presence of such pain serves the larger purpose of God's master plan, which is to maximize the capacity for joy, or in other words, "to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man." He can no more foster those ends in the absence of suffering and evil than one could find the traction to run or the breath to sing in the vacuum of space. God does not instigate pain or suffering, but He can weave it into His purposes. "God's power rests not on totalizing omnipotence, but on His ability to alchemize suffering, tragedy, and loss into wisdom, understanding, and joy. — Terryl L. Givens

Achilles glared at him and answered, Fool, prate not to me about covenants. There can be no covenants between men and lions, wolves and lambs can never be of one mind, but hate each other out and out an through. Therefore there can be no understanding between you and me, nor may there be any covenants between us, till one or other shall fall — Homer

Here I was with Barrons dead. Again.
I knew he wasn't really dead, or at least he wouldn't be for long, but my grief was too fresh and my emotions too complicated.
"How long until he - " I broke off, horrified to hear the catch of a sob in my voice.
"Why do you give a fuck?"
"I don't, I mean, I just - shit!" I turned and beat at the wall with my fists. I didn't care that my parents could hear the dull thud or that the wall shuddered beneath my blows. I didn't care what Lor thought of me. I hated Barrons being dead. Hated it. Beyond reason. Beyond my understanding.
I punched until Lor caught my bloody fists and pulled me away.
"How long?" I demanded. "I want to know! Answer me or else!"
He grinned faintly. "What, you gonna feed me bloody runes?"
I scowled. "Do you guys tell each other everything?"
"Not everything. Pri-ya sounded pretty fucking fascinating to me. Never did get all the details. — Karen Marie Moning

We don't live in a shared reality, we each live in a reality of our own, and causing upset is often the price of trying to reach each other. It's always easier to dismiss other people than to go through the awkward and time consuming process of understanding them. We have given 'taking offense' a social status it doesn't deserve: it's not much more than a way of avoiding difficult conversations. — Frankie Boyle

There can be no living together without understanding, and understanding means compromise. Compromise is not a dirty word, it is the cornerstone of civilization, just as politics is the art of making civilization work. Men do not and cannot and hopefully will never think alike, hence each must yield a little in order to avoid war, to avoid bickering. Men and women meet together and adjust their differences, this is compromise. He who stands unyielding and immovable upon a principle is often a fool, and often bigoted, and usually left standing alone with his principle while other men adjust their differences and go on. — Louis L'Amour

--and yet, in my heart, I always knew we loved each other, a part of me understanding that the passion with which we hurt each other came from something strong enough to withstand the blows we inflicted. Looking back, I guess I always felt that we would have time to work things out eventually, not imagining what was to come; that we would one day have to cut all ties and never speak again. — Camilla Way

He is dying. Yet within the context of us, this fact can seem irrelevant. I might sometimes say, So What? This is not the same as denial. It is simply that our understanding of each other is unchanged and will not change until this is over. It sticks to us like spray on skin. He loves. He is loved, He has loved. He will be loved. — Marion Coutts

The whole character and fortune of the individual are affected by the least inequalities in the culture of the understanding; for example, in the perception of differences. Therefore is Space, and therefore Time, that man may know that things are not huddled and lumped, but sundered and individual. A bell and a plough have each their use, and neither can do the office of the other. Water is good to drink, coal to burn, wool to wear; but wool cannot be drunk, nor water spun, nor coal eaten. The wise man shows his wisdom in separation, in gradation, and his scale of creatures and of merits is as wide as nature. The foolish have no range in their scale, but suppose every man is as every other man. What is not good they call the worst, and what is not hateful, they call the best. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

This is the best it's ever been for me, Abby," Todd murmured into my hair. "The best." He kissed my ear. Slowly. "This." He kissed it again. "I hope you understand that."
"Yes," I whispered, not really understanding anything.
Todd pulled back, leveling our faces. "Do you?" he asked intently.
Then we crashed together, like two dehydrated hikers finding an oasis in each other's mouths. — Ophelia London

If there is no point in the universe that we discover by the methods of science, there is a point that we can give the universe by the way we live, by loving each other, by discovering things about nature, by creating works of art. And that - in a way, although we are not the stars in a cosmic drama, if the only drama we're starring in is one that we are making up as we go along, it is not entirely ignoble that faced with this unloving, impersonal universe we make a little island of warmth and love and science and art for ourselves. That's not an entirely despicable role for us to play. — Steven Weinberg

Communication. It's important to be completely open and fearless when it comes to communication. Good, bad, happy, sad. Talk it out, hug, see a shrink, text each other, hurl marshmallows. Whatever it takes to ensure a deep understanding of each other's feelings. Cancer is not a solo mission. — Ethan Zohn

Remember to build each other up, to strengthen and sustain, to keep companionship lovely and alive. Remember dignity and respect; understanding; not expecting perfection; a sense of humor and a sense of what is sacred and serious; common purposes, common convictions, and the character to stay with a bargain, to keep a covenant - in these are the making of a good and solid marriage. — Richard L. Evans

I hope we, the American people, can come to the understanding that we are not each other's enemies. The enemies are those who are stoking the flames of division, trying to divide us into every category. — Benjamin Carson

The other attack going viral on tumblr at the moment is that I write novels about broken people who need saving, and that this encourages the romanticization of brokenness. Well, maybe there are wholly self-sufficient unbroken people who are able to thrive in complete isolation, succeeding solely by the sweat of their own Randian brows, but those are not the people I know or am interested in writing about. So yeah. I write about broken people who need other people in order to go on. But those are the only kind of people I know to exist. We are all broken. We all depend upon each other for support and compassion. That web of interconnected yearning and need is essential to my understanding of human experience, and I don't find celebrating it problematic. — John Green

Don't even try understanding the dumber sex. Just be happy they're getting along now and not punching each other's lights out. — Tonya Burrows

It is not possible to live in today's society without a cozy home. What is a cozy home? A cozy home is a place where there is a unity in all those who live there, an understanding in all those who relate to it. There is a will to sacrifice for each other; there is a will to live for each other; there is a will to protect each other. — Harbhajan Singh Yogi

Friends
or lovers
are not always available to each other. Inner turmoils can cause us to be unhearing when someone needs us, to need to receive understanding when we should be giving understanding. — Madeleine L'Engle

It has been the practice of all Christian commentators on the Bible, and of all Christian priests and preachers, to impose the Bible on the world as a mass of truth, and as the word of God; they have disputed and wrangled, and have anathematized each other about the supposable meaning of particular parts and passages therein; one has said and insisted that such a passage meant such a thing, another that it meant directly the contrary, and a third, that it meant neither one nor the other, but something different from both; and this they have called understanding the Bible.
It has happened, that all the answers that I have seen to the former part of 'The Age of Reason' have been written by priests: and these pious men, like their predecessors, contend and wrangle, and understand the Bible; each understands it differently, but each understands it best; and they have agreed in nothing but in telling their readers that Thomas Paine understands it not. — Thomas Paine

Listen, she said, "cherubim have come to my planet before."
"I know that. Where do you think I got my information?"
"What do you know about us?"
"I have heard that your host planet is shadowed, that it is troubled."
"It is beautiful," Meg said defensively.
She felt a rippling of his wings. "In the middle of your cities?"
"Well-no-but I don't live in a city."
"And is your planet peaceful?"
"Well-no-it isn't very peaceful."
"I had the idea," Proginoskes moved reluctantly within her mind, "that there are wars on your planet. People fighting and killing each other."
"Yes, that's so, but-"
"And children go hungry."
"Yes."
"And people don't understand each other."
"Not always."
"And there's-there's hate?"
"Yes."
She felt Proginoskes pulling away. "All I want to do," he was murmuring to himself, "is go some place quiet and recite the names of the stars... — Madeleine L'Engle

The unhappy are egoistic, spiteful, unjust, cruel, and less capable of understanding each other than fools. Unhappiness does not bring people together but draws them apart, and even where one would fancy people should be united by the similarity of their sorrow, far more injustice and cruelty is generated than in comparatively placid surroundings. — Anton Chekhov

One of the most widely held beliefs in our culture today is that romantic love is all important in order to have a full life but that it almost never lasts. A second, related belief is that marriage should be based on romantic love. Taken together, these convictions lead to the conclusion that marriage and romance are essentially incompatible, that it is cruel to commit people to lifelong connection after the inevitable fading of romantic joy. The Biblical understanding of love does not preclude deep emotion. As we will see, a marriage devoid of passion and emotional desire for one another doesn't fulfill the Biblical vision. But neither does the Bible pit romantic love against the essence of love, which is sacrificial commitment to the good of the other. If we think of love primarily as emotional desire and not as active, committed service, we end up pitting duty and desire against each other in a way that is unrealistic and destructive. — Timothy Keller

The main reason for civilization is that life is more comfortable. In a way, houses are there to protect us from rain, cold, and heat; cars are there to overcome distances. Culture is the exception. Music, art, and all of the different cultural expressions are not going in that direction. They're not about comfort; they're about understanding each other. — Pipilotti Rist

I think the notion of understanding each other is a relief. It's not a thing you get with everyone you hang out with. — Joshua Homme

Expansion in love is an action that is available to every being in the universe all the time. A willing awareness will take
us to heaven, a loving attitude will make us free. Nothing else controls our fate. Good or bad behavior is secondary.
Whatever you are doing, love yourself for doing it. Whatever you are thinking, love yourself for thinking it. Love is the
only dimension that needs to be changed. If you are not sure how it feels to be loving, love yourself for not being sure of
how it feels. There is nothing on earth more important than the love which conscious beings feel towards each other,
whether or not it is ever expressed. — Thaddeus Golas

Nature to all things fixed the limits fit
And wisely curbed proud man's pretending wit.
As on the land while here the ocean gains.
In other parts it leaves wide sandy plains
Thus in the soul while memory prevails,
The solid power of understanding fails
Where beams of warm imagination play,
The memory's soft figures melt away
One science only will one genius fit,
So vast is art, so narrow human wit
Not only bounded to peculiar arts,
But oft in those confined to single parts
Like kings, we lose the conquests gained before,
By vain ambition still to make them more
Each might his several province well command,
Would all but stoop to what they understand. — Alexander Pope

Is the purpose of theoretical physics to be no more than a cataloging of all the things that can happen when particles interact with each other and separate? Or is it to be an understanding at a deeper level in which there are things that are not directly observable (as the underlying quantized fields are) but in terms of which we shall have a more fundamental understanding? — Julian Schwinger

Let us make recommendations to ensure that NASA officials deal in a world of reality, understanding technological weaknesses and imperfections well enough to be actively trying to eliminate them. They must live in a world of reality in comparing the costs and utility of the shuttle to other methods of entering space. And they must be realistic in making contracts and in estimating the costs and difficulties of each project. Only realistic flight schedules should be proposed -- schedules that have a reasonable chance of being met. If in this way the government would not support NASA, the so be it. NASA owes it to the citizens from whom it asks support to be frank, honest, and informative, so that these citizens can make the wisest decisions for the use of their limited resources. — Richard Feynman

Classical understanding is concerned with the piles and the basis for sorting and interrelating them. Romantic understanding is directed toward the handful of sand before the sorting begins. Both are valid ways of looking at the world although irreconcilable with each other. What has become an urgent necessity is a way of looking at the world that does violence to neither of these two kinds of understanding and unites them into one. Such an understanding will not reject sand-sorting or contemplation of unsorted sand for its own sake. Such an understanding will instead seek to direct attention to the endless landscape from which the sand is taken. That is what Phaedrus, the poor surgeon, was trying to do. — Robert M. Pirsig

I felt not jealousy so much as shame for not understanding the bond between them. The bond that was stalwart in the face of complacency and cruelty and wandering desire. The habit of each other that was the bedrock upon which they'd sunk the foundation of their mutual existence - and upon which they were standing, still. I — Jan Ellison

Administrators tend to lump Asians in Chicago into one group, not understanding that these kids would be fighting each other, the Cambodians and the Vietnamese. We started a thing called cultural gift sharing, where everyone comes and says what his culture is, so the teachers and the administrators could understand they are different. — Malik Yusef

Let us know our differences! Let us understand our differences! Let us know and understand that we are all different people with different differences! We all have different differences that are not all that different! Understanding is the matter! When we get to know and understand our differences well, we shall least spit on each other just because of our differences! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

? Life is all about relationships and what actually happens when people relate, when people understand each other. To see each other for who they are, not what we want or expect of them. Margaret Bouchard — Ted Magnuson

I think everybody came into it with the understanding that they would go through an experience that is literally not by the book, that is not executing the script and then going home, but living and breathing these characters and being in the moment with each other, and improvising and creating a lot of present-tense intensity between characters. — Oren Moverman

And scholars of the mystical, or esoteric, or inner teachings of the world's Great Traditions are fairly unanimous in saying that although the outer teachings of each tradition are considerably different, often even contradictory, the inner esoteric teachings, the teachings based not on beliefs but on direct spiritual experiences of Waking Up, show a remarkable similarity in what they say, which is why the mystics of virtually all the world's religions have great ease in understanding each other, even as their exoteric brethren argue themselves silly. — Ken Wilber

In perfect understanding, it seemed, they looked at each other. Questions of failure, of haste, all the what if's of life, did not matter. The quiet in her was talking to the quiet in him. — Anne Rice

Since each person, as an individual, is the not-being of the other, it is never possible to eliminate non-understanding completely. — Friedrich Schleiermacher

The way of Friends is to think quietly and to listen. We ask the question, we consider how the answer is made by different people, we ask again, answer again, change our minds; we reach an understanding. The Meeting evolves this way, not by shouting each other down, not by the weight of the majority, but by the capacity of individual human beings to comprehend one another. — Molly Gloss

The wood wide web has been mapped, traced, monitored, and coaxed to reveal the beautiful structures and finely adapted languages of the forest network. We have learned that mother trees recognize and talk with their kin, shaping future generations. In addition, injured tress pass their legacies on to their neighbors, affecting gene regulation, defense chemistry, and resilience in the forest community. These discoveries have transformed our understanding of trees from competitive crusaders of the self to members of a connected, relating, communicating system. Ours is not the only lab making these discoveries-there is a burst of careful scientific research occurring worldwide that is uncovering all manner of ways that trees communicate with each other above and below ground. — Peter Wohlleben

Whether you realize it or not, you are a theologian. You come to a book like this with a working theology, an existing understanding of God. Whether you are an agnostic or a fundamentalist - or something in between - you have a working theology that shapes and informs the way you think and live. However, I suspect that you are reading this book because you're interested in examining your theology more closely. You are open to having it challenged and strengthened. You know that theology - the study of God - is more than an intellectual hobby. It's a matter of life and death, something that affects the way you think, the decisions you make each day, the way you relate to God and other people, and the way you see yourself and the world around you. — Michael S. Horton

The Search for reason ends at the known; on the immense expanse beyond it only the sense of the ineffable can glide. It alone knows the route to that which is remote from experience and understanding. Neither of them is amphibious: reason cannot go beyond the shore, and the sense of the ineffable is out of place where we measure, where we weigh. We do not leave the shore of the known in search of adventure or suspense or because of the failure of reason to answer our questions. We sail because our mind is like a fantastic seashell, and when applying our ear to its lips we hear a perpetual murmur from the waves beyond the shore. Citizens of two realms, we all must sustain a dual allegiance: we sense the ineffable in one realm, we name and exploit reality in another. Between the two we set up a system of references, but we can never fill the gap. They are as far and as close to each other as time and calendar, as violin and melody, as life and what lies beyond the last breath. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

Carlos, are we in complete understanding with each other?"
"Yeah," I say. "As long as it's not in your house and you don't know about it, you're okay with us messin' around."
"I know you're joking with me. You are joking with me, aren't you?"
"Maybe. — Simone Elkeles

Long before they had ever met, I think this destiny awaited them. They were not like ships passing in the night. It wasn't like they didn't understand each other. They understood each other better than anyone else, and each was focused solely on the other. — Gen Urobuchi

Surely we can only come to understand each other's beliefs by means of direct encounter and open, honest discussion. In the meantime, many free churches invite all believers in Jesus Christ to the Table for the sake of true spiritual unity that transcends intellectual differences of interpretation. Withholding sacramental sharing on the basis of disagreement about the nature of the Lord's Supper seems odd to us. What two people think exactly alike about the act? We are not offended by Catholics' closed Communion, but we find it odd and exclusive. It places intellectual understanding above fellowship among disciples of Jesus Christ. — Roger E. Olson

Hearing, seeing and understanding each other, humanity from one end of the earth to the other now lives simultaneously, omnipresent like a god thanks to its own creative ability. And, thanks to its victory over space and time, it would now be splendidly united for all time, if it were not confused again and again by that fatal delusion which causes humankind to keep on destroying this grandiose unity and to destroy itself with the same resources which gave it power over the elements. — Stefan Zweig

We pass the word around; we ponder how the case is put by different people, we read the poetry; we meditate over the literature; we play the music; we change our minds; we reach an understanding. Society evolves this way, not by shouting each other down, but by the unique capacity of unique, individual human beings to comprehend each other. — Lewis Thomas

A novel which survives, which withstands and outlives time, does do something more than merely survive. It does not stand still. It accumulates round itself the understanding of all these persons who bring to it something of their own. It acquires associations, it becomes a form of experience in itself, so that two people who meet can often make friends, find an approach to each other, because of this one great common experience they have had ... — Elizabeth Bowen

The interesting thing was that the Roman Catholic monks and the Buddhist monks had no trouble understanding each other. Each of them was seeking the same experience and knew that the experience was incommunicable. The communication is only an effort to bring the hearer to the edge of the abyss; it is a signpost, not the thing itself. But the secular clergy reads the communication and gets stuck with the letter, and that's where you have the conflict. — Joseph Campbell

Now all the myths that you have heard and that resonate with you, those are the elements from round about that you are building into a form in your life. The thing worth considering is how they relate to each other in your context, not how they relate to something out there-how they were relevant on the North American prairies or in the Asian jungles hundreds of years agon, but how they are relevant now-unless by contemplating their former meaning you can begin to amplify your own understanding of the role they play in your life. — Joseph Campbell

It's not entirely absurd to think that somewhere in the past of mankind someone, for the first time, did in his mind the equivalent of putting an adjective to a noun, and saw, not only a relationship, but this special relationship between two things of different kinds ... In sum, all the seemingly complicated kinds of modification in English are just ways of thinking and seeing how things go with each other or reflect each other. Modifiers in our language are not aids to understanding relationships; they are the ways to understand relationships. A mistake in this matter either comes from or causes a clouded mind. Usually it's both. — Richard Mitchell

The two climbers looked at each other, a glance that bored all the way down to Medvetz's DNA - not desperate or pleading or frightened but resolved, almost at peace. Here were two men, united in their obsessive enterprise, their trajectories intersecting for just an instant, but an instant that contained some fundamental understanding: the long journey full of failures and setbacks, injuries and disfigurement and pain, propelled by a commitment beyond reason. Here were two men in this inhospitable place, the wind raking across the ridge, the shadows lengthening - one departing his life, the other walking back into it.
"God bless you," Medvetz murmured. "Good-bye."
And then he faced down the mountain and resumed lumbering along the route, toward Brice and Brett Merrell and Mogens Jensen and all the others waiting for him in the world below. — Nick Heil

Most of us operate from a narrower frame of reference than that of which we are capable, failing to transcend the influence of our particular culture, our particular set of parents and our particular childhood experience upon our understanding. It is no wonder, then, that the world of humanity is so full of conflict. We have a situation in which human beings, who must deal with each other, have vastly different views as to the nature of reality, yet each one believes his or her own view to be the correct one since it is based on the microcosm of personal experience. And to make matters worse, most of us are not even fully aware of our own world views, much less the uniqueness of the experience from which they are derived. — M. Scott Peck

This essay is intended to serve as a reminder that immense and threatening divisions in mankind can spring from differences between virtues as well as from envies and greeds. When the virtues on each part are largely inapprehensible by the other, the danger is heightened by Man's natural fear of what he does not understand, and his inclination to suppose it not worth understanding. To attack it easier than to study. There are also, in this case of China and the West, intense and complex cultural vanities on both sides to be taken into account: vanities largely inexplicable the one to the other... — Ivor A. Richards