Good writers have two things in common: they prefer to be understood rather than admired; and they do not write for knowing and over-acute readers.
Friedrich Nietzsche
You become what you understand.
Søren Kierkegaard
To be really related to another is possible only when ambition, suspicion, competition, the sense of possession, with all their bitterness, anger and frustrations, are totally absent.
Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meeting Life
I’ve always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
Other people’s understanding of us is made up of so many complex misunderstandings.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand.
Søren Kierkegaard in his journal [1847]
In order to understand, I destroyed myself.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
We should be content with the incomprehensibility of the universe; the desire to understand makes us less than human, for to be human is to know that one does not understand.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
Understanding is what wearies us most of all. To live is to not think.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
It is because we no longer have anything to hide that we can no longer be apprehended.
Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plataeus
Anyone who wants to be understood will never know the delight of being understood, because this happens only to the complex and misunderstood; simple souls, the ones whom other people can understand, never feel a desire to be understood.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
If only one had not learned, from birth onwards, to give certain accepted meanings to everything, but instead was able to see the meaning inherent in each thing rather than that imposed on it from without. If only one could know the human reality of the woman selling fish and go beyond just labeling her a fishwife and the known fact that she exists and sells fish... If only one could notice everything for the first time, not apocalyptically, as if they were revelations of the Mystery, but directly as the flowerings of Reality.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
What is there to confess that’s worthwhile or useful? What has happened to us has happened to everyone or only to us; if to everyone, then it’s no novelty, and if only to us, then it won’t be understood. If I write what I feel, it’s to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant. I make landscapes of what I feel. I make holidays of my sensations.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
I wouldn’t be the person I am, I wouldn’t understand what I understand, were it not for certain books... A novel worth reading is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is, of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.
Susan Sontag
Have you ever considered, beloved other, how invisible we are to each other? We look at each other without seeing. We listen to each other and hear only a voice inside out self.
The words of others are mistakes of our hearing, shipwrecks of our understanding. How confidently we believe in our interpretation of other people’s words.
Fernando Pessoa