understanding is the absence of the demand for understanding — now or tomorrow.

Misunderstood! It is a right fool's word. Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

We have come to confuse information with understanding.

If you cannot understand something, then you have understood it incorrectly.

Understanding means throwing away your knowledge.

We cannot understand. The best is perhaps what we understand least.

Our understanding is a faculty of concepts, i.e., a discursive understanding, for which it must of course be contingent what and how different might be the particular that can be given to it in nature and brought under its concepts.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Not to understand is profound; to understand is shallow. Not to understand is to be on the inside; to understand is to be on the outside.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

Guarding knowledge is not a good way to understand. Understanding means to throw away your knowledge.

Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word 'understanding.

When someone expresses some feeling or attitude or belief, our tendency is, almost immediately, to feel “That’s right”; or “That’s stupid”; “That’s abnormal”; “That’s unreasonable”; “That’s incorrect”; “That’s not nice.” Very rarely do we permit ourselves to understand precisely what the meaning of his statement is to him. I believe this is because understanding is risky. If I let myself really understand another person, I might be changed by that understanding. And we all fear change. So as I say, it is not an easy thing to permit oneself to understand an individual, to enter thoroughly and completely and empathically into his frame of reference. It is also a rare thing.