A psychoneurosis must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.

Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding.

If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.

The infinite faith I have in people’s ability to understand anything that makes sense has always been justified, finally, by their behavior.

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.

One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

You hear about actors being late and all that sort of stuff, but you never find that with an actor who’s directed, because an actor who’s directed understands all the problems your production is going through.

I write from my soul. This is the reason that critics don’t hurt me, because it is me. If it was not me, if I was pretending to be someone else, then this could unbalance my world, but I know who I am.

There’s a rebel lying deep in my soul.

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.

Meditation is to get insight, to get understanding and compassion, and when you have them, you are compelled to act.

A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ.

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.

Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and – since there is no other metaphor – also the soul.

When we understand string theory, we will know how the universe began. It won’t have much effect on how we live, but it is important to understand where we come from and what we can expect to find as we explore.

When you have enough understanding and compassion in you, then that amount of understanding and compassion will try to express itself in action. And your practice should help you to cultivate more understanding and compassion.

To use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding; one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience; ultimately one must have one’s experiences in common.

We pledge ourselves to liberate all our people from the continuing bondage of poverty, deprivation, suffering, gender and other discrimination.

Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man’s desire to understand.

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.

Jesus is a divine guest inside of you all the time – one who loves, understands, sees and hears you. He wants to live in oneness with you… to be the centerpiece of everything you do.

I used to tell my husband that, if he could make me ‚understand‘ something, it would be clear to all the other people in the country.

Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.

In the end, people are persuaded not by what we say, but by what they understand.

The design of the Mac wasn’t what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it.

Why should we think upon things that are lovely? Because thinking determines life. It is a common habit to blame life upon the environment. Environment modifies life but does not govern life. The soul is stronger than its surroundings.

Dogmas are collective conceptual prisons. And the strange thing is that people love their prison cells because they give them a sense of security and a false sense of ‚I know.‘ Nothing has inflicted more suffering on humanity than its dogmas.

The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.

The answer I found is you stay away from the people who make fun of you, and you join these ad hoc groups who understand your craziness.

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it ‚the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.‘ The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of ‚Artist.‘

Talk to a man about himself and he will listen for hours.

I don’t understand why or how we can bully each other.

My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.

Read with care, George Orwell’s diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.

Anyone who is practicing understanding and compassion can exemplify true power. Anyone can be a Buddha.

To understand Europe, you have to be a genius – or French.

For so many people, television and movies may be the only way they understand people who aren’t like them.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.

As long as your body is healthy and under control and death is distant, try to save your soul; when death is immanent what can you do?

Meditation demands an astonishingly alert mind; it is the understanding of the totality of life in which every form of fragmentation has ceased.

Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.

To understand the nature of the people one must be a prince, and to understand the nature of the prince, one must be of the people.

If you’re doing a biography, you try to stay as accurate as possible to reality. But you really don’t know what was going on in the person’s mind. You just know what was going on in the minds of people around him.

Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face nothing new under the sun.

When you really listen to another person from their point of view, and reflect back to them that understanding, it’s like giving them emotional oxygen.

When there’s justice and change, you start to see the cleansing of the soul, and that is what I want for people, and I hope it’s okay for me to say those things.

Without pain, there would be no suffering, without suffering we would never learn from our mistakes. To make it right, pain and suffering is the key to all windows, without it, there is no way of life.

I read Plato’s ‚Republic.‘ I read it through about five times until I could actually understand it.

Mandela’s heroism is the heroism of a man who suffered so badly for what he thought of as freedom. And yet when he had the upper hand he has this incredible self-control and these incredible leadership qualities.

Men and women do think differently, and frankly, we don’t understand each other. Not at all! But that’s what makes relationships so amazing.

Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.

A friend is one who knows you and loves you just the same.

It’s very hard for our parents who see us enter a world that they can’t imagine.

A person hears only what they understand.

They are resilient children, but they are children, and as much as they need help to understand the hard truths in life, they also need what we all need – protection and love.

To be social is to be forgiving.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it’s dead for you.