No one would talk much in society if they knew how often they misunderstood others.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

No people in the history of the world have ever been so misunderstood, so misjudged, and so cruelly maligned.
John Brown Gordon

The really good idea is always traceable back quite a long way, often to a not very good idea which sparked off another idea that was only slightly better, which somebody else misunderstood in such a way that they then said something which was really rather interesting.
John Cleese

The surest method of being incomprehensible or, moreover, to be misunderstood is to use words in their original sense; especially words from the ancient languages.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.
Jean Cocteau

There are so many things that are misunderstood or not recognized about my father's music because they've been filtered by people who work for magazines like Rolling Stone.
Dweezil Zappa

There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.
Antonin Artaud

These seem to me so ambiguous, so vague, so easily misunderstood in comparison to genuine music, which fills the soul with a thousand things better than words.
Felix Mendelssohn

To be great is to be misunderstood.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

To be misunderstood can be the writer's punishment for having disturbed the reader's peace. The greater the disturbance, the greater the possibility of misunderstanding.
Anatole Broyard