“فهمت فأردت فغلبت القدر”
“An understanding of our position in Christ gives us security”
“La nuit, tout sent bon , disait Mondo. C est parce qu on ne voit pas , disait Thi Chin. on sent mieux, et on entend mieux quand on ne voit pas .”
“There are certain points I do not yet understand: They will be clear later. I am also convinced That you only hold a fragment of the explanation. It is only because of what you do not understand That you feel the need to declare what you do. There is more to understand: hold fast to that As the way to freedom.”
“She lived a good deal by herself, to herself, working, passing on from day to day, and always thinking, trying to lay hold on life, to grasp it in her own understanding. Her active living was suspended, but underneath, in the darkness, something was coming to pass. If only she could break through the last integuments!”
“The choices were mine. The errors, mine. But if people only understood how those mistakes were never intended. If only they understood how I never meant to end up here. Not like this. Never this broken. Never this stained. Perhaps if they understood, they would cease to speak of me in the cold, judgmental way they do. If only one person understood.”
“The more I listen, the less I hate. The less I hate, the more I am free to choose actions that are controlled not by animosity but by wisdom.”
“Criticism is the weapon of the shallow, scrutiny is tool of the wise.”
“There’s a deep humility in listening because the focus is more on understanding the other person than on saying everything that comes into your mind.”
“Some people are born sentenced to terrible inheritance, diseases that lay dormant in the blood from birth. My sentence was to know, to understand.”
“The more knowledge you have, the more you can love, he said. Love comes from understanding, not from ignorance.”
“Some truths, some people will never understand; some, no one will ever understand.”
“We re closest to a true understanding of the world when we re closest to understanding our own bodies.”
“We are closest to a true understanding of others when we are closest to understanding ourselves.”
“God will bore through mountains of intellect for a grain of faith - for it is not the intellectual who finds Him, but He who finds the intellectual.”
“That means, I thought, I can look out from inside myself like looking out of a plane, it doesn t really matter at all where you look out from, what matters is what you see . . .”
“People, Shai said, rising to fetch another seal, by nature attempt to exercise power over what is around them. We build walls to shelter us from the wind, roofs to stop the rain. We tame the elements, bend nature to our wills. It makes us feel as if we re in control. Except in doing so, we merely replace one influence with another. Instead of the wind affecting us, it is a wall. The fingers of man s influence are all about, touching everything. Man-made rugs, man-made food. Every single thing in the city that we touch, see, feel, experience comes as the result of some person s influence. We may feel in control, but we never truly are unless we understand people. Controlling our environment is no longer about blocking the wind, it s about knowing why the serving lady was crying last night, or why a particular guard always loses at cards. Or why your employer hired you in the first place.”