Sometimes you hear a person speak the truth and you know that they are speaking the truth. But you also know that they have not heard themselves, do not know what they have said: do not know that they have revealed much more than they have said. This may be why the truth remains, on the whole, so rare.

you do not realize that one has to learn to speak the truth. it seems to you that it is enough to wish or to decide to do so. and i tell you that people comparatively rarely tell a deliberate lie. in most cases they think they speak the truth. and yet they lie all the time, both when they wish to lie and when they wish to speak the truth. they lie all the time, both to themselves and to others. therefore nobody ever understands either himself or anyone else. think - could there be such discord, such deep misunderstanding, and such hatred towards the views and opinions of others, if people were able to understand because they cannot help lying. to speak the truth is the most difficult thing in the world; and one must study a great deal and for a long time in order to be able to speak the truth. the wish alone is not enough. to speak the truth one must know what the truth is and what a lie is, and first of all in oneself. and this nobody wants to know.

To tell the truth is very difficult, and young people are rarely capable of it.

It was difficult to tell them the truth when a lie would have been so much easier for them to understand.

The older I grow, the more I realize how terribly difficult it is for people to understand each other, and I think that what misleads one is the fact that they all look so much like each other. If some people looked like elephants and others like cats, or fish, one wouldn’t expect them to understand each other and things would look much more like what they really are.

Unless you really understand others, you can hardly attain your own self-understanding.

The truth can cause a lot of trouble for those who are not supposed to know it.

قسما بالله إن معرفة هؤلاء القوم أصعب من معرفة الحق !

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.

How difficult it is to understand each other, my dear angel, and how much thought is incommunicable, even between people who love each other!

I always find it more difficult to say the things I mean than the things I don't.

I do not find it easy to talk to people I don't know.

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.

It’s hard nowadays to get people to believe things. At least good things.