understanding

...come lie beside me again and understand - the others can show by actions, but I alone will immortalize you in words...

There are things known__hings experienced, felt, and understood__hat words hold no power to convey. Attempting to do so only dilutes their substance and does them injustice.

Any fool can know. The point is to understand.

_the way people understood things had a lot to do with the way people were, how they had been shaped, what the wanted; tricks of rhetoric would not shift them.

The weight of your words is more important than the volume of your voice!

Is not most talkingA crazed defense of a crumbling fort?I thought we came hereTo surrender in Silence.

The hardest things to talk about are the ones we ourselves can't understand.

Words are powerful instruments. Handle them and your understanding level of new information will grow in a spectacular way.

There__ a larger point to be made here than my own obtuseness, which is the fragility, beauty, and at the same time resilience of any communication. An inchoate impulse forms into a feeling that resembles but can never match the dreamy intensity of the original impulse. This feeling then articulates itself, but the words at best approximate a shadow of the feeling. I speak or write these words, and of course the person who receives them brings to that receiving his or her own connotations: Cinnamon, for example, may conjure different memories and may mean something different for you than for me. These words may then settle into feelings, leading finally, perhaps, to some impulse on your part. With so many layers of interpretation, it's no wonder we so often misunderstand each other. And this is between two people who speak the same language. How much more difficult understanding can be, then, when the people do not share a common cultural background, or native tongue? How much more than this may we misunderstand when we then hear a dog speak, or a tree or stone?

You have to understand and appreciate the value in people before you can notice those in need and be of help.

Dictionaries stop where the heart starts.

Senses empower limitations, senses expand vision within borders, senses promote understanding through pleasure.

To understand possible means to understand impossible.

He will understand when it is too late that it is easier to love.

I can relate to Marguerite Duras even though I'm not French, nor have I been consumed by love for an East Asian man. I can life inside Alice Munro's skin. But I can't relate to my own mother. My body is full of sentences and moments, my heart resplendent with lovely turns of phrases, but neither is able to be touched by another.

Even if a poem is beautiful and memorable, it__ not like an advertising jingle or propaganda, which attempt to convince and control. Poems seek to confuse, disabuse, enlarge understanding, and make people ask questions and think for themselves.

And that is to say, of course, that you can "read" a culture without its literature, without the bother of gathering and holding its ideas, considering their genesis and evolution, and weighing them in the balance with each other.

For every shrill and violent voice that throws itself in front of microphones and cameras in the name of God, there are countless lives of gentleness and good works who will not. We need to see and hear them, as well, to understand the whole story of religion in our world.