How can a better understanding of ourselves and the world around us help us?

That’s what I want to explore in this post filled with the very best quotes on understanding.

These timeless, thought-provoking thoughts from the past 2300 years will help you to build a deeper, richer and more successful life.

And if you want more motivation and wisdom from the past then have a look at these you are enough quotes and this post with quotes on knowing your worth and value.

Quotes About Understanding Life and Yourself

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
Carl Jung

“Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain but it takes character and self control to be understanding and forgiving.”
Dale Carnegie

“Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow. Delay may give clearer light as to what is best to be done.”
Aaron Burr

“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.”
Galileo Galilei

“You don’t need strength to let go of something. What you really need is understanding.”
Guy Finley

“Everyone hears only what he understands.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“To understand the heart and mind of a person, look not at what he has already achieved, but at what he aspires to.”
Kahlil Gibran

“Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.”
Marie Curie

“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

“You do not understand even life. How can you understand death?”
Confucius

“Furious activity is no substitute for understanding.”
H.H Williams

“If we are to live together in peace, we must come to know each other better.”
Lyndon Johnson

“A matter that becomes clear ceases to concern us.”
Friedrich Nietzsche

“The reality of the other person is not in what he reveals to you, but in what he cannot reveal to you. Therefore, if you would understand him, listen not to what he says but rather what he does not say.”
Kahlil Gibran

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
Søren Kierkegaard

“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

“We are all so desperate to be understood, we forget to be understanding.”
Beau Taplin

“The funny thing about facing imminent death is that it really snaps everything else into perspective.”
James Patterson

“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

“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.”
Khalil Gibran

“If you know the why, you can live any how.”
Friedrich Nietzsche

“Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Understanding your past can help you create a better future.”
Robert Tew

“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven? And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives? When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see in truth that you are weeping for that which has been your delight.”
Kahlil Gibran

“Just because we don’t understand doesn’t mean that the explanation doesn’t exist.”
Madeleine L’Engle

“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

“The highest activity a human being can attain is learning to understand because to understand is to be free.”
Baruch Spinoza

“Only the development of compassion and understanding for others can bring us the tranquility and happiness we all seek.”
Dalai Lama

Quotes About Understanding Love and Relationships

“Love is an untamed force. When we try to control it, it destroys us. When we try to imprison it, it enslaves us. When we try to understand it, it leaves us feeling lost and confused.”
Paulo Coelho

“Do not seek the because – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.”
Anaïs Nin

“One of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood.”
Seneca

“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

“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand.”
Henri Nouwen

“If I know what love is, it is because of you.”
Herman Hesse

“Love does not dominate; it cultivates.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“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

“You know it’s love when all you want is that person to be happy, even if you’re not part of their happiness.”
Julia Roberts

“It takes courage to love, but pain through love is the purifying fire which those who love generously know. We all know people who are so much afraid of pain that they shut themselves up like clams in a shell and, giving out nothing, receive nothing and therefore shrink until life is a mere living death.”
Eleanor Roosevelt

“You know you’re in love when you don’t want to fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”
Dr. Seuss

“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

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”
Anaïs Nin

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
Rumi

“The art of love is largely the art of persistence.”
Albert Ellis

“A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.”
Elbert Hubbard

“To say that one waits a lifetime for his soulmate to come around is a paradox. People eventually get sick of waiting, take a chance on someone, and by the art of commitment become soulmates, which takes a lifetime to perfect.”
Criss Jami

“The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.”
Blaise Pascal

“Blessed are they who have the gift of making friends, for it is one of God’s greatest gifts. It involves many things, but above all the power of going out of one’s self and appreciating what is noble and loving in another.”
Thomas Hughes

“Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”
James Baldwin

“If you aren’t good at loving yourself, you will have a difficult time loving anyone, since you’ll resent the time and energy you give another person that you aren’t even giving to yourself.”
Barbara De Angelis

“Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.”
Rainer Maria Rilke

“A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.”
Honore de Balzac

“Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust and hostility to evaporate.”
Albert Schweitzer

You might also find this post with quotes about toxic people helpful to navigate your relationships.

Quotes About Not Understanding

“Just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean it isn’t so.”
Lemony Snicket

“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.”
Albert Einstein

“Rabbit’s clever,” said Pooh thoughtfully.
“Yes,” said Piglet, “Rabbit’s clever.”
“And he has Brain.”
“Yes,” said Piglet, “Rabbit has Brain.”
There was a long silence.
“I suppose,” said Pooh, “that that’s why he never understands anything.”
A.A. Milne

“Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.”
Euripides

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Upton Sinclair

“Sometimes it’s not enough to know what things mean, sometimes you have to know what things don’t mean.”
Bob Dylan

“Knowing is not understanding. There is a great difference between knowing and understanding: you can know a lot about something and not really understand it.”
Charles Kettering

“I know you despise me; allow me to say, it is because you do not understand me.”
Elizabeth Gaskell

“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

Quotes About Patience and Understanding

“Be patient and understanding. Life is too short to be vengeful or malicious.”
Phillips Brooks

“Trying to understand is like straining through muddy water. Have the patience to wait! Be still and allow the mud to settle.”
Lao Tzu

“Patience is the mark of true love. If you truly love someone, you will be more patient with that person.”
Thich Nhat Hanh

“I have seen many storms in my life. Most storms have caught me by surprise, so I had to learn very quickly to look further and understand that I am not capable of controlling the weather, to exercise the art of patience and to respect the fury of nature.”
Paulo Coelho

“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.“
Albert Einstein

“What do you first do when you learn to swim? You make mistakes, do you not? And what happens? You make other mistakes, and when you have made all the mistakes you possibly can without drowning – and some of them many times over – what do you find? That you can swim? Well – life is just the same as learning to swim! Do not be afraid of making mistakes, for there is no other way of learning how to live!”
Alfred Adler

“Patience is the companion of wisdom.”
St. Augustine

“An inventor fails 999 times, and if he succeeds once, he’s in. He treats his failures simply as practice shots.”
Charles F. Kettering

“Have patience. All things are difficult before they become easy.”
Saadi

“Patience is the calm acceptance that things can happen in a different order than the one you have in your mind.”
David G. Allen

“So, what should I talk about?”

When it comes to conversations I think this is one question we have asked both others and ourselves many, many times

Often in our heads, when already in a conversation, with an awkward silence looming and while trying to scramble for something to say. :)

That’s not an entirely bad place to be though. Pauses in conversations are natural and it’s good to get used to the social pressure of a conversation gone quiet.

However, if you too often run into silences, if they have a tendency to go on for a little bit too long then it’s always good to have few pointers stored at the back of your mind. Here are 5 great things to talk about. And a little bit further down, 5 things you should probably try to avoid talking about.

1. The person you are talking to

2. Your surroundings

3. The news and water cooler topics

4. Likes and dislikes

5. Relatable emotions and experiences

Five Potentially Awful Topics to Talk About

So, what topics should you avoid? None, really. But some topics are perhaps are only suited for some conversations. Maybe with close friends or family.

Some topics can get out of hand. You might need to limit the amount of time you talk about them. When people’s eyes are starting to glaze over, when people are starting to look around in the room and stop listening it’s time to change the subject.

Don’t suck the fun and positive energy of conversations. Think before you talk when the subjects below are on your mind.

What is one of the most effective ways to change your own behavior and habits? Doing things backwards.

What I mean by backward is that if you for instance start moving slower you soon start feeling calmer.

If you start to smile – even if your force it – you soon feel happy and like you actually want to smile. It’s kinda strange but it sure does work.

This is not just limited to your body. Instead of changing yourself and through that changing your surroundings you can turn it around. Change your surroundings to change yourself.

How I Changed My Information Diet

During the last year I have changed my information intake habits quite a bit. First, about a year and a half ago, I realized that there wasn’t much I watched on the TV that I really wanted to watch. It was mostly a habit I used to fill out time. So I put the TV in my closet and it’s been there pretty much even since. Nowadays, when I’m at home, I watch just what I want to watch on my computer. I don’t miss the TV, but one thing I’ve noticed is that I have seldom seen popular TV-commercials that people keep bringing up in conversations.

After I started blogging I read a lot of blogs and my bookmark folder became hard to manage and get an overview of. I read online for hours each day. Finally, I got tired of this and it was time to eliminate. So cut I ruthlessly among my RSS-feeds and reduced about 15-20 of them to 7. Then I deleted about 95% of my bookmarks. One important thing I did was deleting bookmarks for sites I was addicted to such as email, RSS-feeds and blogstatistics. Now, when I want to access these sites I have to type in the address manually (or Google it). This has reduced the checking of those sites from about 8 times a day to once or twice.

I’ve used the same method for limiting my use of social bookmarking sites like Reddit and Digg. And to go from checking three of the biggest Swedish newspapers online 3-4 times a day to checking one paper once each day. I did all the switches pretty fast. When the short-cuts were gone the habits and temptations ceased pretty quickly. The new habits were established in about two weeks.

Other Areas of Your Life Where You Can Apply the Same Method

Here are three important areas people often want to change and a few environmental suggestions for each of those areas.

Your Health

• You can replace a bad health habit with a better one by for instance throwing out your cookies and candy. Then fill your fridge and cabinets with healthier snacks such as carrots, fruits and nuts. It might not sound like fun. But you’ll get used to it and appreciate the new replacements sooner than you might think.
• Buy healthier cookbooks – or look for healthy recipes online – and throw out your take-out menus.
• Subscribe to RSS-feeds from the best health blogs and create a bookmark-folder for the best health websites you can find. Make these daily reading to reinforce your new and healthier outlook.
• Leave your running-shoes or soccer out in an easy-to-see place in your apartment/house instead of tucking them into your closet. It’s easy to just get caught up in everyday life and forget exercising (or remember it when you are lying in bed waiting to go to sleep). This is a simple reminder to help you avoid such situations.
• Join a local group and for example start practising yoga or playing basketball. You’ll not only get more exercise but you might also find some new friends that can act a positive health influence on you. I wouldn’t go so far as to ditch the friends you go out drinking beer and sit around watching TV with. But you can expand your circle of friends to reflect and reinforce your new way of living.

Your Income and Financial Situation

• Cut your credit-cards to get out of one growing debt-trap.
• Get a clear picture of your finances and eliminate the things you don’t need. Take them out of your life and soon you may think: Why did I ever start doing those things in the first place?.
• If you have debts or financial problems, don’t use your time by focusing on how bad your situation is. Focus on finding ways to solve the problem. Whatever the challenge is focus your mind on finding solutions.
• Read free and high-quality blogs about finance like Get Rich Slowly and I Will Teach You to Be Rich. Delete the bookmarks to sites where you have spent too much money. Or even better, erase your account at those websites.
• Write down your financial goal(s) on pieces of paper. It might be something like increase your monthly income by 30%. Or reducing your spending each month by 20%. Then tape those pieces of paper on your fridge, bathroom mirror, workspace and computer to see your goal(s) many times a day. This will help you keep your focus on what’s important and what you want.
• Join an online forum for money and finances to get support, new ideas and good conversations going. This can be especially valuable if no-one in your immediate surrounding is interested in managing or discussing money.

Your Social Life

• Join local groups of like-minded people to find new and potentially great friends.
• Try to find friends that can be a positive support. Spend more time with them. Limit you time with negative friends/co-workers. Who you spend time with will decide much of how you’ll feel and what you’ll experience. Hanging with the right crowd for you can do wonders.
• Instead of being hesitant and saying no, say yes for a month whenever someone invites you for something. It’s good to try new environments, and you never who you’ll meet.
• Try replacing the newspaper in the morning with a good sit-com episode or listening/reading a self improvement book. Starting your day on a positive note can lift your spirits and when you are positive rather instead of negative socialising becomes a whole lot easier.
• Try online dating, blind dates or speed dating to get away from the bar/club-scene for a while.
• If your special-interests are too obscure – or your town is too small – go online to find people to discuss with. Or consider joining a group in a larger, nearby city and taking the car, bus or train there.
• If you want to be a more social person, put yourself in more social situations, take more chances, and take more action. People will seldom come to you. If you want to wait for that, prepare for a long wait. Instead, be proactive and take the first step. It can be scary but there are practical ways to overcome that fear. Have a look at Do You Make These 10 Mistakes in a Conversation? and How to Make a Great First Impression for tips and pointers on improving your people skills. Read 5 Life-Changing Keys to Overcoming Your Fear for practical advice on how to overcome social fears and anxieties.

Try brainstorming environmental factors for the change you want to achieve in your life. Have a look at How to Spark Your Creativity and come up with ways to change your environment so it more suits and is a natural part of the life of the person you want to become.

One thing about changing your life is that you can promise yourself to do anything in the future. And that sounds good and feels even better. But later on we can always come up with reasons to rationalize doing what we decided to never do again just a week ago. And those reasons don’t even have to be that great or logical. When we feel like doing whatever it is we want to do – smoke a cigarette, buy a new expensive coat or shy away from facing a fear – then out mind will find ways to rationalize it. And we’ll do it, feeling we have a good reason to. And then the next day we promise ourselves and others to not do it again. And so on.

By removing these things from your environment as best your can and replacing them with more suitable things you take away many of the opportunities to both do and to rationalize doing something. By replacing them with the things, people etc. that the person you want to become would have a around himself or herself it kinda forces you to live up to and adapt to your new surroundings. And so it becomes easier to change and reach your goals.

Your environment is an important part of you and your identity. Every day it reinforces who you are. Tear your environment down and rebuild it to help create and reinforce a new part of yourself and the person you want to become.

What’s the best way to solve a problem?

I really don’t think there is one way to do it. And the ways you can use to solve a problem depends on the problem.

But I have found a few tips that have helped me solve problems more easily. I seldom use all of the tips for solving one problem and they aren’t arranged in any special order.

However, I find doing some of these things early on can really help you solve the problem faster and with less struggle and pain.

[continue reading…]

“The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the right place but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.”
Dorothy Nevill

Social skills and relationships are probably two of the most important things in life.

So it always strikes me as a bit odd that while we learn so much when we grow up there is often somewhat of a lack of advice on how to improve our communication skills.

If there is something that we should learn more about in school, then this is one of those things since it can improve lives and society in a big way.

Of course, if you do some digging and browsing and looking you can find solid and time-tested information from throughout the ages on this topic. And since communication and relationships is a pretty intuitive and free flowing process, advice that applies in all situations is pretty hard to find. Much of these things you have to learn from experience.

But there are some good pointers. Here are five of them. And I think that if you avoid these five mistakes at least most of the time then you can really improve your relationships, your communication skills and your life.

1. Bragging.

You may think bragging about your new car or what you make money wise will impress people. But consciously trying to impress anyone quickly becomes pretty apparent and transparent. And you are likely come a across as an annoying try-hard and insecure person with low self-esteem rather than the coolest kid in town.

2. Being judgemental.

Now, what I’m talking about here is being judgemental about what Paul does for a living, what Lisa defines as her unique fashion style and what Larry did in a drunken haze last weekend.

If you keep up such topics in conversation then soon the people you talk to will probably start to assume that you talk the same way about them when they are not around. And that can put a negative dent and barrier into your relationship.

Besides, being judgemental might make you feel superior for a short while. But overall, it puts negative energy into your own mood and thoughts. And that isn’t especially fun or useful.

3. Putting the spotlight on ME, ME, ME!

An obvious and obnoxious one. A couple of common ways to put the spot-light on yourself are:

• Talking too much.
• Hijacking someone else’s story by interrupting and then relating it to some anecdote in your life. Thereby taking the focus off the other person and on to yourself once again.
• Not really listening, just waiting for your turn to talk again.
• Trying to steer the conversation back to your favourite subjects. And then clinging desperately by talking about them as long as you can.

4. Always be giving advice.

I’ve been guilty of this so many times. :) And I think a lot of people don’t really realize that it might be something to hold back on a bit. If someone is telling you about a problem or situation then it’s easy to assume they want your point of view and advice. And it’s easy to feel clever by dispensing your wisdom.

But sometimes people just want to you to listen and hear them out. It might be a way for them to handle, understanding and solving their own problem. So just listen instead of busting out your problem-solving skills immediately. Assuming a parental role where you are telling what someone what to do can become irritating.

When they are done talking they might ask for your input. Or you can ask if they want to hear what you would do in a similar situation. Or if they want someone to bounce around thoughts and ideas with.

5. Worrying about making mistakes in conversations.

One big problem in conversations is to turn the focus of your mind too much inwards. As soon as you do that conversations stall, you can feel flustered and everything becomes awkward.

You can escape being worried about looking dumb and making mistakes by not focusing on it. Work on focusing your attention more and more outwards, towards the person you are talking to.

If you think you look dumb then it is probably because you were worried about it and became self-conscious. If you can decrease the worry you can decrease the time you feel self-conscious.

And if you aren’t self-conscious then you are far less likely to feel bad and affecting the conversation. Even if you said or did something that might be perceived as kinda dumb. If I’m not self-conscious then I have found that don’t react that badly to what I said/did (even if it was kinda dumb). Most of the time I just move on with the conversation and the people I’m talking to follows.

So, should you try to decrease the attention and focus you put on yourself?

Frankly, at the moment I find it more fun – and difficult – to forget about myself entirely. I just try to be and observe the reality around me. I focus on that. And not on myself (well, a little self-focus is hard to avoid but I try the best I can). It doesn’t work for that long, at least for now. But I find it more interesting experimenting and experiencing with that frame of mind.

3 Solutions for Better Relationships

Try to avoid doing these mistakes.

Don’t just sink into the regular unconscious routine of life. Try to be conscious and aware of how you think and what you say as much as possible. This will allow you to more easily observe your behaviour and bit by bit decrease the number of times you make these mistakes.

Replace your habits.

Since these mistakes quickly become habits you may not just be able to put a stop to them. Instead try a time-tested way for changing habits. Replace the habit rather than removing it. Instead of for instance judging people, try to see a positive side of everyone you meet for 30 days.

It might be hard, but there is just about always something positive in everyone. Adopting this new habit not only replaces a less useful one. It has the added benefit of improving your outlook on the world and can pretty radically change how you view your closest environment such as friends, family and co-workers.

Focus less on yourself.

All of these mistakes are pretty much rooted in being too focused on yourself and boosting your own ego. But you don’t have to keep on boosting your ego to feel good.

The most helpful way I have found so far for overcoming the ego boosting-addiction is by reading – and applying – something by Eckhart Tolle. He discusses the ego in-depth in his books/tapes/dvds and they are great ways to understanding how the ego works in your life and how to get a handle on it. Very useful information that improves your life once you start understanding and applying it.