You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.

I’m 31 now. I think I’m beginning to understand what life is, what romance is, and what a relationship means.

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?

But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

Each day we understand better what the Indians say, and they us, so that very often we are intelligible to each other.

If we can really understand the problem, the answer will come out of it, because the answer is not separate from the problem.

To understand the true quality of people, you must look into their minds, and examine their pursuits and aversions.

Change happens by listening and then starting a dialogue with the people who are doing something you don’t believe is right.

So there’s no guarantee if you like the music you will empathize with the culture and the people who made it. It doesn’t necessarily happen. I think it can, but it doesn’t necessarily happen. Which is kind of a shame.

Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.

Instead of judging people, we need to pray.

My understanding of the Scriptures has been made simple by the person of Christ.

There are very few people who really appreciate my shows. People come to the show and they pay and they enjoy it, but I don’t really think most people really understand what they’ve seen.

I don’t pretend to understand the Universe – it’s a great deal bigger than I am.

Throughout my career, I fed off the fuel of people not being able to understand me.

One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.

If you understand the universe, you control it, in a way.

I think a number of the leaders are, whether you like it or not, in the hip-hop generation. And when they understand enough, they’ll do wonders. I count on them.

The degree of one’s emotions varies inversely with one’s knowledge of the facts.

When we value correct principles, we have truth – a knowledge of things as they are.

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

Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it.

Science is nothing but perception.

Previous generations understood about death, and undoubtedly would have seen a reasonable amount of death. Once you get into the Victorian era, you might well have seen the funerals of many of your siblings before you were very old.

There are three classes of people: those who see, those who see when they are shown, those who do not see.

I think if you follow anyone home, whether they live in Houston or London, and you sit at their dinner table and talk to them about their mother who has cancer or their child who is struggling in school, and their fears about watching their lives go by, I think we’re all the same.

A toddling little girl is a centre of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.

If you have an enemy, then learn and know your enemy, don’t just be mad at him or her.

I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.

For a tear is quickly dried, especially when shed for the misfortunes of others.

Let us more and more insist on raising funds of love, of kindness, of understanding, of peace. Money will come if we seek first the Kingdom of God – the rest will be given.

What air is to the body, to feel understood is to the heart.

You always admire what you really don’t understand.

I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

Life is relationship, living is relationship. We cannot live if you and I have built a wall around ourselves and just peep over that wall occasionally. Unconsciously, deeply, under the wall, we are related.

The wise are wise only because they love. The fool are fools only because they think they can understand love.

Now I am older, I understand we have to accept who we are.

We have to stop and be humble enough to understand that there is something called mystery.

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

Man can be understood only by ascending from physics, chemistry, biology, and geology. In other words, he is first of all a cosmic problem.

You know how big love is? Love is big. love can hold anger; love can even hold hatred.

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

A person once asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality. I replied with another question: ‚Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?‘ We must always consider the person.

Sometimes you recognize that there is a category of human experience that has not been identified but everyone knows about it. That is when I find a term to describe it.

It took Simone a long time to understand why people want Daddy’s autograph. I’d tell her, and my wife would tell her, too, ‚People see Daddy in the movies, and they are excited to meet him.‘ But she couldn’t really grasp it.

What goes on inside a star is better understood than one might guess from the difficulty of having to look at a little dot of light through a telescope, because we can calculate what the atoms in the stars should do in most circumstances.

Gravitation is, so far, not understandable in terms of other phenomena.

So when you are listening to somebody, completely, attentively, then you are listening not only to the words, but also to the feeling of what is being conveyed, to the whole of it, not part of it.

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

I’m no longer just a candidate. I’m the President. I know what it means to send young Americans into battle, for I have held in my arms the mothers and fathers of those who didn’t return. I’ve shared the pain of families who’ve lost their homes, and the frustration of workers who’ve lost their jobs.

I have learned from personal experience that putting trust in God means there will be some unanswered questions. That was a hard lesson for me because I naturally want to understand everything… to know what’s going on so I can feel like I’m in control.

He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed.

We really have to understand the person we want to love. If our love is only a will to possess, it is not love. If we only think of ourselves, if we know only our own needs and ignore the needs of the other person, we cannot love.

I maintain that, if everyone knew what others said about him, there would not be four friends in the world.

If one by one we counted people out For the least sin, it wouldn’t take us long To get so we had no one left to live with. For to be social is to be forgiving.

There are many people in the world who really don’t understand-or say they don’t-what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin!

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

I think that man has a fundamental obligation to extract from himself and from the earth all that it can give; and this obligation is all the more imperative that we are absolutely ignorant of what limits – they may still be very distant – God has imposed on our natural understanding and power.

Understanding does not cure evil, but it is a definite help, inasmuch as one can cope with a comprehensible darkness.