If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a nonworking cat.

Even if you’re happy with the life you’ve chosen, you’re still curious about the other options.

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

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.

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

A better world shall emerge based on faith and understanding.

The eyes like sentinel occupy the highest place in the body.

I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.

My father wasn’t around when I was a kid, and I used to always say, ‚Why me? Why don’t I have a father? Why isn’t he around? Why did he leave my mother?‘ But as I got older I looked deeper and thought, ‚I don’t know what my father was going through, but if he was around all the time, would I be who I am today?‘

It’s a tragedy, in a way, that Americans are brought up to think that they cannot feel for other people and other beings just because they are different. They think they’re different. It’s very limiting.

Sponges grow in the ocean. That just kills me. I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be if that didn’t happen.

But by reading them again and again finally I was able to grasp the essential part. What emotion, enthusiasm, enlightenment and confidence they communicated to me! I wept for joy.

My faith helps me understand that circumstances don’t dictate my happiness, my inner peace.

Curiosity is one of the most permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.

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

An inability to handle language is not the same thing as stupidity.

Either he’s dead or my watch has stopped.

Anybody can be specific and obvious. That’s always been the easy way. It’s not that it’s so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it’s just that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about.

A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats.

In writing, I apply my feminine side and respect the mystery involved in creation.

We should not teach children the sciences; but give them a taste for them.

I mean, if you didn’t get it or if you didn’t feel like you enjoyed it, sometimes that experience can change.

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

One of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood.

When people get married young, you don’t really understand the true definition of marriage.

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

The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.

A boy carries out suggestions more wholeheartedly when he understands their aim.

I love trying new things.

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

Many people find the universe confusing – it’s not.

Our existence is beyond our explanation, whether we believe in God or we have religion or we’re atheist. Our existence is beyond our understanding. No one has an answer.

Confidence, as a teenager? Because I knew what I loved. I loved to read; I loved to listen to music; and I loved cats. Those three things. So, even though I was an only kid, I could be happy because I knew what I loved.

The supernatural is the natural not yet understood.

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.

When a man says he had pleasure with a woman he does not mean conversation.

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.

The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

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.

Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.

Educators take something simple and make it complicated. Communicators take something complicated and make it simple.

People think, because we’re young, we aren’t complex, but that’s not true. We deal with life and love and broken hearts in the same way a woman a few years older might.

People take different roads seeking fulfillment and happiness. Just because they’re not on your road doesn’t mean they’ve gotten lost.

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

There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.

A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.

No better way is there to learn to love Nature than to understand Art. It dignifies every flower of the field. And, the boy who sees the thing of beauty which a bird on the wing becomes when transferred to wood or canvas will probably not throw the customary stone.

I do not recognize the right of the public to break in the front door of a man’s private life in order to satisfy the gaze of the curious… I do not think it right to dissect living men even for the advancement of science. So far as I am concerned, I prefer a post mortem examination to vivisection without anaesthetics.

The human body is strange and flawed and unpredictable. The human body has many secrets, and it does not divulge them to anyone, except those who have learned to wait.

Listen with your eyes for feelings.

You have to see and smell and feel the circumstances of people to really understand them.

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.

Tis but a part we see, and not a whole.

The higher a man stands, the more the word vulgar becomes unintelligible to him.

I do believe that in order to be a successful negotiator that as a diplomat, you have to be able to put yourself into the other person’s shoes. Unless you can understand what is motivating them, you are never going to be able to figure out how to solve a particular problem.

Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.

If you’re in business or politics, you need to have an intense understanding of what’s going on around you.

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

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.