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Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

Carl Gustav Jung - Memories, Dreams, Reflections /

I have laboured carefully, not to mock, lament, or execrate, but to understand human actions.

Baruch Spinoza - Tractatus politicus /

Painters understand nature and love her and teach us to see.

Vincent Willem van Gogh - Letters to Theo /

The best means of learning to know oneself is seeking to understand others.

The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion.

Richard Phillips Feynman /

True artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.

Albert Camus - Speech at the Nobel Banquet, December 10, 1957 /

If you want to understand the meaning of happiness, you must see it as a reward and not as a goal.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery - Citadelle /

A very dangerous state of mind: thinking one understands.

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.

In youth we learn; in age we understand.

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach /

It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.

Soren Kierkegaard - Journals /

Joy in looking and comprehending is nature's most beautiful gift.

Albert Einstein /

Anger and intolerance are the enemies of correct understanding.

Mahatma Gandhi /

They understand but little who understand only what can be explained.

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach /

to understand

To understand is, above all, to unify.

Albert Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus /

to understand

I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.

Albert Einstein /

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.

Background photo by David Marcu on Unsplash

Is it not peculiar that a literal translation is almost always a terrible one? And yet, anything can be translated well. One sees here what it really means to understand fully a language; it means to understand fully the people who speak it.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg /

Personally, I enjoy understanding people more than judging them.

Stefan Zweig - Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman /

Man knows much more than he understands.

People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it's simply necessary to love.

Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.

Honore de Balzac /

There are three kinds of intelligence: one kind understands things for itself, the other appreciates what others can understand, the third understands neither for itself nor through others. This first kind is excellent, the second good, and the third kind useless.

Niccolo Machiavelli - The Prince /

If a lion could talk, we would not understand him.

Ludwig Wittgenstein - Journal /

If a lion could talk, we would not understand him.

© Hans Jürgen Heringer

By trying to understand everything in terms of memory, the past, and words, we have, as it were, had our noses in the guidebook for most of our lives, and have never looked at the view.

It's the simple things in life that are the most extraordinary; only wise men are able to understand them.

True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.

Theodor W. Adorno

You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.

Have patience with the quarrelsomeness of the stupid. It is not easy to comprehend that one does not comprehend.

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach /