„The main thing:… not to let myself be defined by history, not to take it as an excuse—despise it in those who hide their personal insignificance behind it—and yet know it, in order to understand people and above all to see through them“

— Peter Handke

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„I don’t understand people who hide from their past. Everything you live through helps to make you the person you are now.“
— Sophia Loren
„The noblest people are those despising wealth, learning, pleasure and life; esteeming above them poverty, ignorance, hardship and death.“
— Diogenes of Sinope
„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“
— Carl R. Rogers
„You always know the mark of a coward. A coward hides behind freedom. A brave person stands in front of freedom and defends it for others.“
— Henry Rollins
„Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are, that some people see things that others cannot? But there are things old and new which must not be contemplated by men's eyes, because they know, or think they know, some things which other men have told them.“
— Bram Stoker
„Annis had never been a people person, unless ‘people person’ was defined as a person who ate people.“
— Derek Landy
„You see, I divide men into three categories: those who have a lot of money, those who have none at all and those who have a little. The first want to keep what they have: their interest is to maintain order; the second want to take what they do not have: their interest is to destroy the existing order and to establish one which is profitable to them. They each are realist, people with whom one can agree. The third group want to overthrow the social order to take what they do not have, while still preserving it so that no one takes away what they have. Thus, they preserve in fact what they destroy in theory, or they destroy in fact what they seem to preserve. Those are the idealists.“
— Jean Paul Sartre
„I must learn more about these people―try to understand them, put myself in their place. No, instead I am so busy keeping my head above water that I scarcely know who I am, much less who anyone else is.“
— Sylvia Plath
„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 Happiest peoples, it is said, are those which have no history. Those who have a history, those who have made history seem only to have emphazied through their acomplishments the eternality of struggle. These disappear too eventually, just as those who made no effort, who were content to merely live & enjoy.“
— Henry Miller