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

With compassion you can die for other people, like the mother who can die for her child. You have the courage to say it because you are not afraid of losing anything, because you know that understanding and love is the foundation of happiness. But if you have fear of losing your status, your position, you will not have the courage to do it.

Ours is a nation of laws: of citizens who live under them and for the citizens who enforce them. So, to a community in Ferguson that is rightly hurting and looking for answers, let me call once again for us to seek some understanding rather than simply holler at each other. Let’s seek to heal rather than to wound each other.

Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.

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

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

My wife and I don’t compete. We know each other’s preferences, and we work to provide those for each other. One will take over when the other is faced with something he or she dislikes. That’s what friends do.

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.

When you learn about the teaching and the practice of another tradition, you always have a chance to understand your own teaching and practice.

We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

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.

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

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.

Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the understanding of a problem.

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.

The greatest service that can be offered to children who show personality traits or inclinations that might not be understood by the adults around them is to allow them to express their own unique humanity.

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.

If you pursue good with labor, the labor passes away but the good remains; if you pursue evil with pleasure, the pleasure passes away and the evil remains.

You have to understand that people that are hurting are going to criticize.

The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.

So let’s be honest with ourselves and not take ourselves too serious, and never condemn the other fellow for doing what we are doing every day, only in a different way.

The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.

An evil person is like a dirty window, they never let the light shine through.

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.

To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.

If you have the chance to be exposed to a loving, understanding environment where the seed of compassion, loving kindness, can be watered every day, then you become a more loving person.

Cry if you have a compound fracture, by all means. Or if your grandpa died. But otherwise, save it for your pillow.

You can always cope with the present moment, but you cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection – you cannot cope with the future.

If time is not real, then the dividing line between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion.

We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers.

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

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.

Still and all, why bother? Here’s my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.

Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: ‚War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.‘

If human beings were shown what they’re really like, they’d either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.

It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.

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

You’re always learning. The problem is, sometimes you stop and think you understand the world. This is not correct. The world is always moving. You never reach the point you can stop making an effort.

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

I’ve never doubted that apartheid – because it was of itself fundamentally, intrinsically evil – was going to bite the dust eventually.

Wide diversification is only required when investors do not understand what they are doing.

What the mind doesn’t understand, it worships or fears.

What you guys want, I’m for.

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

My focus is to forget the pain of life. Forget the pain, mock the pain, reduce it. And laugh.

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

Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.

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

Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond.

Women are made to be loved, not understood.

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

A physician is not angry at the intemperance of a mad patient, nor does he take it ill to be railed at by a man in fever. Just so should a wise man treat all mankind, as a physician does his patient, and look upon them only as sick and extravagant.

Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

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.

If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.

We’re all caught up in circumstances, and we’re all good and evil. When you’re really hungry, for instance, you’ll do anything to survive. I think the most evil thing – well, maybe that’s too strong – but certainly a very evil thing is judgment, the sin of ignorance.

Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.

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

It is not so much our friends‘ help that helps us, as the confidence of their help.

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

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