A collection of understanding quotes to inspire you to open your heart and mind to understand yourself and other people.
Understanding is our ability to comprehend and grasp information. It can also refer to your sympathetic awareness of another person’s feelings and emotions.
I believe that learning to be more understanding towards other people can greatly change the world and positively impact our lives.
Just imagine, how better the world would be, if we would all be open and compassionate enough to understand someone else’s perspective and accept their different opinions and reality.
May these thought-provoking and inspirational quotes below help you learn to understand yourself more and others.
Here are 70+ Inspiring Understanding Quotes and Sayings
Only the development of compassion and understanding for others can bring us the tranquility and happiness we all seek.
— Dalai Lama XIV
A beautiful woman delights the eye; a wise woman, the understanding; a pure one, the soul.
— Minna Antrim
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
— Carl Gustav Jung
To effectively communicate, we must realize that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding as a guide to our communication with others.
— Tony Robbins
Any fool can know. The point is to understand.
— Albert Einstein
Empathy begins with understanding life from another person’s perspective. Nobody has an objective experience of reality. It’s all through our own individual prisms.
— Sterling K. Brown
Sometimes all a person wants is an empathetic ear; all he or she needs is to talk it out. Just offering a listening ear and an understanding heart for his or her suffering can be a big comfort.
— Roy T. Bennett
The improvement of understanding is for two ends: first, our own increase of knowledge; secondly, to enable us to deliver that knowledge to others.
— John Locke
In order to move on, you must understand why you felt what you did and why you no longer need to feel it.
— Mitch Albom
Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.
Try to understand men. If you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love.
— John Steinbeck
Acceptance doesn’t mean resignation; it means understanding that something is what it is and that there’s got to be a way through it.
— Michael J. Fox
Understanding is the first step to acceptance, and only with acceptance can there be recovery.
— J.K. Rowling
Just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean it isn’t so.
— Lemony Snicket
I am just a human being trying to make it in a world that is rapidly losing its understanding of being human.
— John Trudell
Those who know, do. Those that understand, teach.
— Aristotle
Be the one who nurtures and builds. Be the one who has an understanding and a forgiving heart one who looks for the best in people. Leave people better than you found them.
— Marvin J. Ashton
Truth will always be truth, regardless of lack of understanding, disbelief or ignorance.
—W. Clement Stone
Don’t you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn’t developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don’t expect to see.
— Douglas Adams
We need to accept that we won’t always make the right decisions, that we’ll screw up royally sometimes – understanding that failure is not the opposite of success, it’s part of success.
— Arianna Huffington
Just because we don’t understand doesn’t mean that the explanation doesn’t exist.
— Madeleine L’Engle
Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.
— Rollo May
Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom.
— Clifford Stoll
I call him religious who understands the suffering of others.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards
— Søren Kierkegaard
Inspiring Understanding Quotes
We are all unique. Don’t judge, understand instead.
— Roy T. Bennett
A better world shall emerge based on faith and understanding.
— Douglas MacArthur
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The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.
— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Keep your dreams alive. Understand to achieve anything requires faith and belief in yourself, vision, hard work, determination, and dedication. Remember all things are possible for those who believe.
— Gail Devers
Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain but it takes character and self control to be understanding and forgiving.
— Dale Carnegie
Maturity is not when we start speaking about big things. It is when we start understanding small things.
— Unknown
It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.
— Charles Baudelaire
Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man’s desire to understand.
— Neil Armstrong
When we enlarge our view of the world, we deepen our understanding of our own lives.
— Yo-Yo Ma
Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.
— Albert Einstein
If you want understanding try giving some.
— Malcolm Forbes
Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding, find out what you already know, and you’ll see the way to fly.
— Richard Bach
In the end, we conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand. We will understand only what we are taught.
— Baba Dioum
Life is the first gift, love is the second, and understanding the third.
— Marge Piercy
If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.
— Pearl S. Buck
Seek first to understand and then to be understood.
— Stephen R. Covey
All of physics is either impossible or trivial. It is impossible until you understand it, and then it becomes trivial.
— Ernest Rutherford
We are all so desperate to be understood, we forget to be understanding.
— Beau Taplin
Each one of us has lived through some devastation, some loneliness, some weather superstorm or spiritual superstorm, when we look at each other we must say, I understand. I understand how you feel because I have been there myself. We must support each other and empathize with each other because each of us is more alike than we are unalike.
— Maya Angelou
…treat people with understanding when you can, and fake it when you can’t until you do understand.
— Kim Harrison
You don’t need strength to let go of something. What you really need is understanding.
— Guy Finley
The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.
— Carl Sagan
All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.
— Galileo Galilei
The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.
— Leonardo da Vinci
More Understanding Quotes and Quotes about Understanding
Be not disturbed at being misunderstood; be disturbed rather at not being understanding.
— Chinese proverb
Your friends will know you better in the first minute you meet than your acquaintances will know you in a thousand years.
— Richard Bach
Resilience is really about collaboration and mutual understanding.
— Roger Simpson
Don’t be in a hurry to condemn because he doesn’t do what you do or think as you think or as fast. There was a time when you didn’t know what you know today.
— Malcolm X
A blind man knows he cannot see, and is glad to be led, though it be by a dog; but he that is blind in his understanding, which is the worst blindness of all, believes he sees as the best, and scorns a guide.
— Samuel Butler
Self-questioning and a desire to gain self-understanding is the feted act of humankind.
— Kilroy J. Oldster
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 can overcome any situation, however mysterious or insurmountable it may appear to be.
— Norman Vincent Peale
Love allows understanding to dawn, and understanding is precious. Where you are understood, you are at home. Understanding nourishes belonging. When you really feel understood, you feel free to release yourself into the trust and shelter of the other person’s soul.
— John O’Donohue
If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation.
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.
— Gwendolyn Brooks
Understanding, and action proceeding from understanding and guided by it, is one weapon against the world’s bombardment.
— James Agee
Unity can only be manifested by the Binary. Unity itself and the idea of Unity are already two.
— Buddha
Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.
— Henry David Thoreau
I am afraid that our eyes are bigger than our stomachs, and that we have more curiosity than understanding. We grasp at everything, but catch nothing except wind.
— Michel de Montaigne
A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says can never be accurate because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.
— Bertrand Russell
If you wish to please people, you must begin by understanding them.
— Charles Reade
No one will understand you. It is not, ultimately, that important. What is important is that you understand you.
— Matt Haig
Try to understand men. If you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love.
— John Steinbeck
Everyone hears only what he understands.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things.
— Van Gogh
Love is when you can understand each other’s silences.
— Avijeet Das
One of the tasks of true friendship is to listen compassionately and creatively to the hidden silences. Often secrets are not revealed in words, they lie concealed in the silence between the words or in the depth of what is unsayable between two people.
— John O’Donohue
Whenever you feel like criticizing any one…just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
— Henri Bergson
To perceive is to suffer.
— Aristotle