#understand

While people argue with one another about the specifics of Freud's work and blame him for the prejudices of his time, they overlook the fundamental truth of his writing, his grand humility: that we frequently do not know our own motivations in life and are prisoners to what we cannot understand. We can recognize only a small fragment of our own, and an even smaller fragment of anyone else's, impetus. ↗

— Andrew Solomon

#humility #impetus #motivations #prejudice #truth

All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them. ↗

— Felix Frankfurter

#constitution #depends #everything #laws #life

Our ability to look back on the past, our need or desire to make sense of it, is both a blessing and a curse; and our inability to see into the future with any degree of accuracy is, simultaneously, the thing that saves us and the thing that condemns us. ↗

— James Robertson

#history #insight #life #mankind #past

If you want to be with somebody who gets you, you prefer collusion to desire, safety to excitement (sometimes good things to prefer but not always the things most wanted). The wish to be understood may be our most vengeful demand, may be the way we hang on, as adults, to the grudge against our mothers; the way we never let our mothers of the hook for their not meeting our every need. Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be, among many other things our most violent form of nostalgia. ↗

— Adam Phillips

#nostalgia #understanding #life

He had a theory that musicians are incredibly complex, and know far less than other artists what they want and what they are; that they puzzle themselves as well as their friends; that their psychology is a modern development, and has not yet been understood. ↗

— E.M. Forster

#artists #complexity #friendship #music #musicians

I'm not sure they understand everything about racing cars. I am not sure that this is wise. ↗

— Jean Alesi

#am #cars #everything #i #i am

When you were in love, you were capable of learning everything and of knowing things you had never dared even to think, because love was the key to understanding all of the mysteries. ↗

— Paulo Coelho

#understanding #love

Nothing happens by itself... it all will come your way, once you understand that you have to make it come your way, by your own exertions. ↗

— Ben Stein

#exertions #happens #itself #make #nothing

Violet said nothing, though big pearly tears, like a child's, trembled at her lashes. She suddenly missed John very much. Into him she could pour all the inarticulate perceptions, all the knowings and unknowings she felt, which, though he couldn't understand them really, he would receive reverently, and out of him would come then the advice, the warnings, the clever decisions she could never have made. ↗

— John Crowley

#love #understanding #love

And when wind and winter harden All the loveless land, It will whisper of the garden, You will understand. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#understanding #wife #marriage