Understand Yourself Quotes

It is truly horrible to understand yourself as the essential below of your country. It breaks too much of what we would like to think about ourselves, our lives, the world we move through and the people who surround us. The struggle to understand is our only advantage over this madness. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

You realize that you don't understand yourself any better than you understand anyone else. ~ Jonathan Tropper

Knowledge should mean a full grasp of knowledge:
Knowledge means to know yourself, heart and soul.
If you have failed to understand yourself,
Then all of your reading has missed its call. ~ Yunus Emre

The moment you understand yourself as the true Self, you find such peace and bliss that the impressions of the petty enjoyments you experienced before become as ordinary specks of light in front of the brilliant sun. ~ Swami Satchidananda

We can be walking around in this world, with bits and pieces of our souls scattered in different time loops and space cracks. You feel like you are always looking for yourself, because you actually are always looking for yourself! You're always looking for those bits and pieces of you. You've got to sit down and remember where you left them at. You've got to quiet the noise and go back to those loops in time and cracks in space that you forgot about and you need to understand yourself in those moments, and embrace yourself. And maybe even embrace those who were around you, with you. That's how you get those pieces back, that's how you sew them back into you. ~ C. JoyBell C.

How wonderful to know that when Jesus Christ speaks to you and to me, he enables you to understand yourself, to die to that self because of the cross, and brings the real you to birth. ~ Ravi Zacharias

Ultimately, it's an illusion that you can understand yourself. ~ Paul Schrader

You tend to understand yourself a little better after each role you play. There's somewhat of a self-discovery. ~ Shahid Kapoor

Self-understanding is a lifetime endeavour. It is not a weekend seminar. It does not come in capsule form. ~ Vironika Tugaleva

The degree to which your Consciousness expands, is the degree to which you understand yourself and the universe. ~ Gina Charles

To understand yourself, try to understand a flower and then emulate it. ~ Debasish Mridha

The only way to understand yourself or your life is to start with God. And right at the very beginning the Bible takes us there. If you are not clear about this, you will go wrong everywhere else. ~ Martin Lloyd-Jones

Apples to oranges, the act of comparing your life to another's is more like comparing an elephant to an apple, it makes no sense to compare someone's life that you have no knowledge about to that of your own, of which in all earnest is not something that you completely understand yourself. ~ Forrest Curran

If you want to love and understand yourself better, seek out unfamiliar people in unfamiliar places. ~ Elaine Orabona Foster

You must get outside yourself, and must begin to examine and understand yourself. ~ James Allen

Go in search of your Gift. The process of finding ourselves is called Love. The more you understand yourself, the more you will understand the world. ~ Paulo Coelho

402Emotional position is part of it, but as an individual you are not your emotions, neither are you your intellect. These are things that you have . They're not things that you are . Therefore you have to start to become aware of the different requirements that human beings have, the different areas that they like to be satisfied in. Which means becoming aware of yourself. I mean, as a writer you're gonna have to understand pretty much the whole universe. But the best place to start is by understanding the inner universe. The entire universe – for one thing – only exists in your perceptions. That's all you're gonna see of it. To all practical intents and purposes this is purely some kind of lightshow that's being put on in the kind of neurons in our brain. The whole of reality. So. To understand the universe there's worse advice than that which was carved above the shrine of the Delphi oracle. Where it just said: "Know thyself". Understand yourself. Know thyself is a magical goal, but like I say to me there is very little difference between magic and creative art in any sense – the laws of one apply perfectly well to the other. ~ Alan Moore

TIME. If you can master the art of dealing with it and make use of it to pray, to love, to care, to heal wounds, to solve problems, to be patience, to find the purpose of life, to wait for something worth waiting for, to chase your dreams, to be kind, to have fun, to be happy, to help people and to understand yourself..TIME is the essence of life..Dont waste it but live it ~ Anto Setiadi ~ Anto Setiadi

You can understand other people only as much as you understand yourself and only on the level of your own being. This means you can judge other people's knowledge but you cannot judge their being. You can see in them only as much as you have in yourself. But people always make the mistake of thinking they can judge other people's being. In reality, if they wish to meet and understand people of a higher development than themselves they must work with the aim of changing their being. ~ P.D. Ouspensky

Difficult times are ways to know and understand yourself and others in a better way.
(From 'Voyage to Happiness') ~ Sanchita Pandey

There is no one in the world that can best understand you the way you understand yourself. It only take you to make the best of you. ~ Abdulazeez Henry Musa

To understand yourself is the key to wisdom. ~ Confucius

Once you understand yourself, you can stop fighting your natural tendencies and plan for them instead. ~ Anne Bogel

There are moments of silence and smiles and breaths taken away from the chest, wherein you truly feel a deep understanding for your position in your life, in this world, and within the walls of yourself that you call bones and tissue. You madly understand yourself (your thoughts, your desires, what you want to be living for, really) and it's amazing because it is within those moments where you will come to see how very few people should actually be important to your heart and to your path: because your heart and your path are glorious and different and breathtaking and not everyone belongs there with you. We all often feel pangs of loneliness and we clamour to hold onto other people because it has not yet dawned on us, that not everyone we wish to hold onto will fit on our paths with us. If you could come to an understanding of your own space, and what it means to occupy that space, then you would come to know, and to feel, and to realise, that we are not lonely in our hearts because others do not occupy with us; rather, we are painfully lonely in our hearts because we do not occupy our own skin. We do not occupy our own souls. We do not occupy the space we've been given by our own dreams, desires, longings... what makes you cry? What makes you laugh? It doesn't matter if you're the only one who cries or who laughs! What matters is that you fill up your space so full that your soul rubs up against your bones and pushes up against just below the surface of your skin. You will ~ C. JoyBell C.

In meditation, you are moving closer and closer to yourself, and you begin to understand yourself so much more clearly. You begin to see clearly without a conceptual analysis, because with regular practice, you see what you do over and over and over and over again. You see that you replay the same tapes over and over and over in your mind. The name of the partner might be different, the employer might be different, but the themes are somewhat repetitious. Meditation helps us to clearly see ourselves and the habitual patterns that limit our life. ~ Pema Chodron

When you try to understand everything, you will not understand anything. The best way is to understand yourself, and then you will understand everything. ~ Shunryu Suzuki

I think trying to write is a religious exercise. You are trying to understand life, and you can only get the illusion of doing it fully by writing. That is, it's the only way I can come to understand things fully. When I create, when I put my own mark on something and form it, I begin to know the whole truth about it, how it was put together. Then you can begin to change things around. You know all this after you have written a lot. You really know. And it has become the most important thing in your life. It has nothing to do with craft, or even art, in a way. It is making sense of life. It is coming to understand yourself. ~ Peter Taylor

To me, getting up every single night and trying to reach out to an audience, and trying to dig deeper and further in the play to serve the writer and to understand yourself in that context is how you continue to grow and learn. ~ Kevin Spacey

Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way. ~ Janet Fitch

Definitely, some will doubt you, but don't doubt yourself. Surely, some will hate your mission, but don't hate your vision. Truly, some will envy your vision, but don't change your vision. Surely, some will mock at your direction, but don't neglect your focus. Surely, you shall meet obstacles, but learn to overcome all obstacles with wit. Frankly, some will say what they want to you, but say what is inspiring to yourself. Obviously, you shall meet fear, but learn to shake your fears. In fact, there shall be moment of drought, but learn to go with tenacity and an indomitable staying power. You may meet the rocks, but climb the rocks with fortitude to the apex, and you shall feel the fresh air! Truly, you shall hear so many things, but know what to listen to. Surely, some will misunderstand you, but learn to understand yourself. You may definitely have so many things to do, but mind what is more important and weightier. There is no great journey without issues, but learn to overcome all issues, and get to the end of the journey with distinctive footprints and a good sense of fulfillment. You were born for a purpose! Live it; achieve it! God is waiting for you at the finishing line; get there with a pleasant story for a glory! ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

You have to understand yourself before you can understand anything else. ~ Amy Zhang

If you want to understand yourself, Then do not examine yourself. Just love yourself more sincerely, More soulfully And more self-givingly. ~ Sri Chinmoy

I truly feel that if you understand yourself and set goals without the regulations and limitations others put on you, then nothing is impossible. ~ Christopher

When you understand yourself, that very day you have understood the whole of humanity. Then nobody can make you miserable ... ~ Rajneesh

Read for fun, read for information, read in order to understand yourself and other people with quite different ideas. Learn about the world beyond your door. Learn to be compassionate and grow in wisdom. Books can help us in all these ways. ~ Katherine Paterson

What is the point of life except to gather more experiences and to understand yourself? ~ Jaym Gates

More people are watching your life and ... are gaining strength in their own lives and in their own challenges because of what you're going through. I promise you: your life matters, your life is significant, and things are happening that you don't even fully understand yourself. ~ Jeff Goins

If you work long enough and hard enough to understand yourself, you will come to discover that this vast part of your mind, of which you now have little awareness, contains riches beyond imagination. ~ M. Scott Peck

Love knows no classification whether you are rich, poor, minority, famous, man, woman, or whatever you have been labeled. Love is love and is for everyone.

To understand your soul is to understand yourself. ~ Michelle E. Faulkner-Mullins

You've got to be willing to stay committed to someone over the long run, and sometimes it doesn't work out. But often if you become real honest with yourself and honest with each other, and put aside whatever personal hurt and disappointment you have to really understand yourself and your spouse, it can be the most wonderful experience you've ever had. ~ Hillary Clinton

If you agree with an outside person's interpretation of you, that's a happy bit of affirmation. It means you're communicating externally what you believe to be true internally. If you disagree, it helps clarify how you understand yourself. And maybe makes you productively question how to improve your communication skills. ~ Heidi Julavits

If you understand others you are smart.
If you understand yourself you are illuminated.
If you overcome others you are powerful.
If you overcome yourself you have strength.
If you know how to be satisfied you are rich.
If you can act with vigor, you have a will.
If you don't lose your objectives you can be long-lasting.
If you die without loss, you are eternal. ~ Lao-Tzu

But the more you thing about it, I think the best songwriter is the one who makes you feel like you are in the best place in the world when you are listening to his or her songs. The one who makes you understand yourself a little better when your ears hear their words. At that moment, that songwriter is the best. That's the beauty of a song. ~ Billy Joe Shaver

Did you hook up with your girlfriend yet?"
"No. But I have high hopes for that. Assuming I can stay alive."
"High hopes for what?"
"Our relationship."
"Why?" she asks. "What's changed between then and now?"
This is one of these utterly simple and obvious questions that is irritating
because Hiro's not sure of the answer. "Well, I think I figured out what she
was doing -- why she came here."
Another simple and obvious question. "So, I feel like I understand her now."
"You do?"
"Yeah, well, sort of."
"And is that supposed to be a good thing?"
"Well, sure."
"Hiro, you are such a geek. She's a woman, you're a dude. You're not supposed
to understand her. That's not what she's after."
"Well, what is she after, do you suppose -- keeping in mind that you've never
actually met the woman, and that you're going out with Raven?"
"She doesn't want you to understand her. She knows that's impossible. She just
wants you to understand yourself. Everything else is negotiable."
"You figure?"
"Yeah. Definitely."
"What makes you think I don't understand myself?"
"It's just obvious. You're a really smart hacker and the greatest sword fighter
in the world -- and you're delivering pizzas and promoting concerts that you
don't make any money off of. How do you expect her to -- ~ Neal Stephenson

You can never get a true measure of a person - you can never fully understand yourself, even - because life is always throwing new things at us. ~ K.M. Shea

It takes time to understand yourself, to go inside yourself and to question yourself and really take yourself to task. That's self-expression. ~ John Leguizamo

To really help people, you first need to understand them - but first understand yourself, prepare yourself; develop the clarity, the courage, and the sensitivity to exert the right leverage, in the right place, at the right time. Then your actions will have power. History," he added, "holds many examples of individuals and nations who acted without the wisdom to foresee the consequences ~ Dan Millman

In the age of Facebook and Instagram you can observe this myth-making process more clearly than ever before, because some of it has been outsourced from the mind to the computer. It is fascinating and terrifying to behold people who spend countless hours constructing and embellishing a perfect self online, becoming attached to their own creation, and mistaking it for the truth about themselves.20 That's how a family holiday fraught with traffic jams, petty squabbles and tense silences becomes a collection of beautiful panoramas, perfect dinners and smiling faces; 99 per cent of what we experience never becomes part of the story of the self.
It is particularly noteworthy that our fantasy self tends to be very visual, whereas our actual experiences are corporeal. In the fantasy, you observe a scene in your mind's eye or on the computer screen. You see yourself standing on a tropical beach, the blue sea behind you, a big smile on your face, one hand holding a cocktail, the other arm around your lover's waist. Paradise. What the picture does not show is the annoying fly that bites your leg, the cramped feeling in your stomach from eating that rotten fish soup, the tension in your jaw as you fake a big smile, and the ugly fight the happy couple had five minutes ago. If we could only feel what the people in the photos felt while taking them!
Hence if you really want to understand yourself, you should not identify with your Facebook account or with the inner story of the s ~ Yuval Noah Harari

To understand yourself: Is that a discovery or a creation? ~ Pascal Mercier

Because isn't the whole point of loving someone–being in love with someone–that you understand her as well as you understand yourself? Isn't loving someone almost like becoming that person, and them becoming you? I mean, isn't that the point, at least in a way? ~ Bennett Madison

If it's a phase, so what? If it's your whole life, who cares? You're destined to evolve and understand yourself in ways you never imagined before. And you've got our blood running through your beautiful veins, so no matter what, you've been blessed with the spirit of women who know how to love. ~ Gabby Rivera

I mean, let's face it, it's 2000 and people are beginning to wake up on some level. I think that, as I was saying earlier, there's just no denying the impact that showing people the truth can have. It allows people to understand themselves, and when you understand yourself you can understand the people around you. And then you can begin to let go of all the bullshit that leads into things like world wars, racism, stereotypes, and bigotry. ~ Gale Harold

If you don't want anyone to misunderstand you, go into yourself and thoroughly investigate and understand yourself. No one will ever misunderstand you ever again. ~ Hong Curley

The more you understand yourself, the more you will understand the world. And the closer you will be to your Soulmate. ~ Paulo Coelho

When you have set out the goals that you are claiming is yours in life and, more importantly, relentlessly taking the actions to produce, it's only a matter of when. We are wired to win. You are wired to win. Define your game. Embrace the challenge. And strive to understand yourself in deeper and more meaningful ways. True understanding of yourself and your personal constraints allows for ever unfolding degrees of freedom and success. The more aware you become of your hard wiring, the more space and opportunity become available in those areas. Step out there. Trust yourself. Give yourself fully to your vast capacity for victory. Set the the challenge of winning in new and exciting ways. Demand your greatness of yourself and repeat after me: I am wired to win. ~ Gary John Bishop

This is the mystery. When you understand one thing through and through, you understand everything. When you try to understand everything, you will not understand anything. The best way is to understand yourself, and then you will understand everything. So when you try hard to make your own way, you will help others, and you will be helped by others. Before you make your own way you cannot help anyone, and no one can help you. To ~ Shunryu Suzuki

How do you explain something that you can't even understand yourself? ~ Nicholas Sparks

The best way is to understand yourself, and then you will understand everything.
So when you try hard to make your own way, you will help others, and you will be helped by others.
Before you make your own way you cannot help anyone, and no one can help you. ~ Shunryu Suzuki

When you're teenager, your hormones and your emotions are so tumultuous and so unpredictable. You're just trying to understand yourself. ~ Penelope Mitchell

Yes, I'm a terrific teacher : Grow, Sarah, but not too much.
Understand yourself, but not better than I understand you. Be
brave, but not so brave you don't need me any more. Your silence
frightens me. When I'm in that silence, I hear nothing, I feel like
nothing. I can never pull you into my world of sound any more
than you can open some magic door and bring me into your
silence. I can say that now. ~ Mark Medoff

For Habermas, scientism means science's belief in itself: that is, 'the conviction that we can no longer understand science as one form of knowledge, but rather must identify knowledge with science'. ~ Simon Critchley

I've always figured it that you die each day and each day is a box, you see, all numbered and neat; but never go back and lift the lids, because you've died a couple of thousand times in your life, and that's a lot of corpses, each dead a different way, each with a worse expression. Each of those days is a different you, somebody you don't know or understand or want to understand. ~ Ray Bradbury

Don't underestimate this gift of finding a place in the writing world: if you really work at describing creatively on paper the truth as you understand it, as you have experienced it, with the people or material who are in you, who are asking that you help them get written, you will come to a secret feeling of honor. ~ Anne Lamott

Asian face and local language skills to handle the cash. I had just returned to the States from Vietnam, having left the military under a cloud, the origins of which I was able to understand only years later. My mother, the American half of the marriage, had just died; I had no brothers or sisters; ~ Barry Eisler

The complete concurrence of souls requires the concurrence of the breath, for what is the breath, if not the rhythm of the soul? And thus, in order for people to understand one another, they must walk or lie side by side. ~ Marina Tsvetaeva

The Golden Horn of Griffo is finely wrought," Zenodotus said, tracing his finger along the curve of Telemach's treasure. "And the magic is in its making alone. Do you understand? There is no sorcery here - none that I can detect. ~ Robin Sloan

If a work of architecture consists of forms and contents that combine to create a strong fundamental mood powerful enough to affect us, it may possess the qualities of a work of art. This art has, however, nothing to do with interesting configurations or originality. It is concerned with insights and understanding, and above all truth. Perhaps poetry is unexpected truth. It lives in stillness. Architecture's artistic task is to give this still expectancy a form. The building itself is never poetic. At most, it may possess subtle qualities, which, at certain moments, permit us to understand something that we were never able to understand in quite this way before. ~ Peter Zumthor

A man spent hours watching a butterfly struggling to emerge from its cocoon. It managed to make a small hole, but its body was too large to get through it. After a long struggle, it appeared to be exhausted and remained absolutely still.

The man decided to help the butterfly and, with a pair of scissors, he cut open the cocoon, thus releasing the butterfly. However, the butterfly's body was very small and wrinkled and its wings were all crumpled.

The man continued to watch, hoping that, at any moment, the butterfly would open its wings and fly away. Nothing happened; in fact, the butterfly spent the rest of its brief life dragging around its shrunken body and shrivelled wings, incapable of flight.

What the man – out of kindness and his eagerness to help – had failed to understand was that the tight cocoon and the efforts that the butterfly had to make in order to squeeze out of that tiny hole were Nature's way of training the butterfly and of strengthening its wings.

Sometimes, a little extra effort is precisely what prepares us for the next obstacle to be faced. Anyone who refuses to make that effort, or gets the wrong sort of help, is left unprepared to fight the next battle and never manages to fly off to their destiny. ~ Paulo Coelho

If you have never wept bitter tears because a wonderful story has come to an end and you must take your leave of the characters with whom you have shared so many adventures, whom you have loved and admired, for whom you have hoped and feared, and without whose company life seems empty and meaningless.
If such things have not been part of your own experience, you probably won't understand what Bastian did next. ~ Michael Ende

My life is ... a mystery which I do not attempt to really understand, as though 1 were led by the hand in a night where I see nothing, but can fully depend on the love and protection of Him who guides me. ~ Thomas Merton

Just because I like sushi, doesn't mean I can make sushi. I've come to well understand how many years just to get sushi rice correct. It's a discipline that takes years and years and years. So, I leave that to the experts. ~ Anthony Bourdain

Then he told himself to be calm: this took place a thousand times a day all over the world. He did not need to understand it. The baby would come without his help. ~ Ken Follett

If he didn't fully understand where I came from, he understood who I was now
he knew how well done I liked my steak, knew the color of my toothbrush, the expression I made when I realized I'd forgotten to roll up my car window before it rained. ~ Curtis Sittenfeld

Value investors will not invest in businesses that they cannot readily understand or ones they find excessively risky. Hence few value investors will own the shares of technology companies. Many also shun commercial banks, which they consider to have unanalyzable assets, as well as property and casualty insurance companies, which have both unanalyzable assets and liabilities. ~ Seth Klarman

You understand? If you can read you can cook. You can always feed yourselves. You remember that. ~ Kent Haruf

You are a thinker. I am a thinker. We think that all human beings are thinkers. The amazing fact is that we tend to think against artificial intelligence - that various kind of computers or artificial robots can think, but most of us never cast any doubt on human thinking potential in general. If during natural conservation with human any computer or artificial robot could generate human-like responses by using its own 'brain' but not ready-form programming language which is antecedently written and included in the brain design and which consequently determine its function and response, then that computer or artificial robot would unquestionably be acknowledged as a thinker as we are. But is it absolutely true that all humans are capable of using their own brain while interpreting various signals and responding them? Indeed, religion or any other ideology is some kind of such program which is written by others and which determines our vision, mind and behavior models, depriving us of a clear and logical thinking. It forces us to see the world with its eyes, to construct our mind as it says and control our behavior as it wants. There can be no freedom, no alternative possibilities. You don't need to understand its claims, you need only believe them. Whatever is unthinkable and unimaginable for you, is said higher for your understanding, you cannot even criticise what seems to be illogical and absurd for you. The unwritten golden rule of religion and its Holy Scripture is tha ~ Elmar Hussein

People who understand everything get no stories. ~ Bertolt Brecht

Noise is any pattern we don't understand. [ ... ] If we perceive something as noise, it's most likely a failure of ourselves, not a failure of the universe. ~ Raph Koster

Some people say, "Sometimes I have violent thoughts, what can I do?" So I say, "Well, have them!" Cos we should not try to control ourselves. It's very bad to control ourselves in this sense. If you have any emotion at all, if its a bad emotion or good emotion, think about it, you should just understand that you have those emotions. And it's good because we are people and we have all these emotions. And the result of that is you would become more and more peaceful. If you don't let those emotions be inside of you then you become extremely violent. ~ Yoko Ono

I don't know what to do. I only know that it's taken me years to understand that life was pushing me in a direction I didn't want to go in. ~ Paulo Coelho

When we practice zazen we just practice zazen, without any gaining idea. When we talk about something we just talk about something, ... without trying to express some intellectual, one-sided idea. And we listen without trying to figure or some intellectual understanding, without trying to understand from just a one-sided view. ~ Shunryu Suzuki

I am beginning to understand that the stream the scientists are studying is not just a little creek. It's a river of energy that moves across regions in great geographic cycles. Here, life and death are only different points on a continuum. The stream flows in a circle through time and space, turning death into life across coastal ecosystems, as it has for more than a million years. But such streams no longer flow in the places where most of us live. ~ Kathleen Moore

If men could become pregnant - or be legally raped, or understand the unsubtle differences between 'yes' and 'no', i am certain you would soon see them change their tune about abortion and the treatment and trivialization of the suffering of rape victims. ~ Christina Engela

Present is living with your feet firmly grounded in reality, pale and uncertain as it may seem. Present is choosing to believe that your own life is worth investing deeply in, instead of waiting for some rare miracle or fairytale. Present means we understand that the here and now is sacred, sacramental, threaded through with divinity even in its plainness. Especially in its plainness. ~ Shauna Niequist

While knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create. ~ Albert Einstein

To understand why, submit and apply. ~ Andy Stanley

I don't understand why one should be one thing or the other. Writing, to me, is writing is writing. It should be a flexible tool. Whatever skills I have, have to work for me; I won't be dictated by them. ~ Sonya Hartnett

Life's too short to try and understand cold-blooded creatures. ~ Rita Mae Brown

Thoroughly worldly people never understand even the world; they rely altogether on a few cynical maxims which are not true. ~ G.K. Chesterton

I'm so smart, I read and understand Hegel ~ Oscar Wilde

The stories he told became boring to me through repetition, but I understand now that he was just trying to fix that place with the compass of his memories. Throughout ~ Jeff VanderMeer

As to your Newton, I confess I do not understand his void and his gravity; I admit he has demonstrated the movement of the heavenly bodies with more exactitude than his forerunners; but you will admit it is an absurdity to maintain the existence of Nothing.
[Letter to Voltaire, 25 Nov. 1777] ~ Frederick The Great

I understand what it is like to rely on beauty and know the shallowness of it ... Yet, it is impossible to say if you would have caught my attention the first time had you been plain and wrapped in brown. Thus remains the endless dilemma of beauty's impressionable curse. ~ Anne Mallory

The fact is that if the Christian home, church, and school have done their job well and the student has learned well, he may be one of the few on the earth who understand the real world. ~ Jim Berg

The great prophetic work of the modern world is Goethe's Faust, so little appreciated among the Anglo-Saxons. Mephistopheles offers Faust unlimited knowledge and unlimited power in exchange for his soul. Modern man has accepted that bargain ...
I believe in what the Germans term Ehrfurcht: reverence for things one cannot understand. Faust's error was an aspiration to understand, and therefore master, things which, by God or by nature, are set beyond the human compass. He could only achieve this at the cost of making the achievement pointless. Once again, it is exactly what modern man has done. ~ Robert Aickman

Why we should believe in wolf children seems somehow easier to understand than the ways we distinguish between what is human and what is animal behavior. In making such distinctions we run the risk of fooling ourselves completely. We assume that the animal is entirely comprehensible and, as Henry Beston has said, has taken form on a plane beneath the one we occupy. It seems to me that this is a sure way to miss the animal and to see, instead, only another reflection of our own ideas. ~ Barry Lopez

It is not enough to live here and now. Not enough for me, anyway. I need those imaginative leaps out of my own time frame and into other places - places where things were done differently. Reading has provided me with that, for the most part, but it is objects, things like these scraps of pottery, that have most keenly conjured up all those elsewheres - inaccessible but eerily available to the imagination. The past is irretrievable, but it lurks. It sends out tantalizing messages, coded signals in the form of a clay pipe stem, a smashed wine bottle. Two leaping fish from twelfth-century Cairo. I can't begin to understand what that time was like, or how the men who made them lived, but I can know that it all happened - that old Cairo existed, and a particular potter. To have the leaping fish sherd on my mantelpiece - and all those other sherds in the cake tin - expands my concept of time. There is a further dimension to memory; it is not just a private asset, but something vast, collective, resonant. And all because fragments of detritus survive, and I can consider them. ~ Penelope Lively

You cannot understand how much patience I need in order not to lose my patience, so that I can withstand all this misfortune all by myself.

Nikos Kazantzakis, from a letter to Galatea Kazantzaki wr. c. June 1922 ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

The roots of our grief coil so deeply into loss that death has come
to live with us like a family member who makes you happy by avoiding
you, but who is still one of the family. Our anger is a rage that
Westerners cannot understand. Our sadness can make the stones
weep. And the way we love is no exception ~ Susan Abulhawa

Somewhere, sometime, I stopped really living. I stopped really trying. And I don't understand why. ~ Steven Rowley