top of page
.png){kind=small}
"Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Understanding quotes
"This deliberate focus and sensitivity allow you to "put yourself in another person's shoes and walk around a while" to better understand where they are coming from and what they are all about."
"It is called understanding when one accepts other's talks of wisdom; but, where is the wisdom filled talk in this era?"
"It's frustrating when our best efforts to help people fail. But if we could see life through their weary eyes and experience their trials with the same frayed emotions, we might understand why."
"We have less reason to be surprised or offended when we find others differ from us in opinions because we very often differ from ourselves."
"No poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it."
"But suppose it was truth double strong, it were no truth to me if I couldna take it in. I daresay there's truth in yon Latin book on your shelves; but it's gibberish and no truth to me, unless I know the meaning o' the words."
"Not by discovering new wow things you are able to understand the truth about nature, but by changing the very fundamental way of perceiving anything you've ever seen in daily life."
"I pray for sufficient wisdom to understand that wisdom apart from God is the stuff of opinion tainted by the rot of bias. And if I am somehow apt to confuse such rubbish with wisdom, I will think myself wise but find myself living in a landfill."
"There was no conflict between science and religion ever. The conflicts were actually between two different systems of human understanding " one was science, which was based on rigorous observations and examinations, and the other was fundamentalism, that's based on undisputed belief on the scriptures."
"We may feel in control, but we never truly are unless we understand people. Controlling our environment is no longer about blocking the wind, it's about knowing why the serving lady was crying last night, or why a particular guard always loses at cards."
Explore more quotes by Alain de Botton
"Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don't know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate."
"Being political doesn't only or principally mean caring what party wins the next election, to be political is to care about the happiness of strangers."
"I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. I was simply liberated by the thought that there might be a way to engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural content - a way, to put it in more abstract terms, to think about Fathers without upsetting my respectful memory of my own father. I recognized that my continuing resistance to theories of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for giving up on the music, buildings, prayers, rituals, feasts, shrines, pilgrimages, communal meals and illustrated manuscripts of the faiths."
"It is this idea 'decency' should be attached to wealth -and 'indecency'' to poverty - that forms the core of one strand of skeptical complaint against the modern status-ideal. Why should failure to make money be taken as a sign of an unconditionally flawed human being rather than of a fiasco in one particular area if the far larger, more multifaceted, project of leading a good life?Why should both wealth and poverty be read as the predominant guides to an individual's morals ?"
"And yet, troublingly, there is one difference between 'labour' and other elements [raw materials, machinery] which conventional economics does not have a means to represent, or give weight to, but which is nevertheless unavoidably present in the world: the fact that labour feels pain."
"[T]he unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion and fear, which blind us to the fact that they are really, despite a thousand differences, just altered versions of ourselves: fellow fragile, uncertain, flawed beings likewise craving love and in urgent need of forgiveness."
"A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It's almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments."
bottom of page