Life must be understood backwards; but... it must be lived forward.
Soren Kierkegaard

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
Soren Kierkegaard

I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose.
Charlie Chaplin

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood - never.
Albert Camus

I sort of understood that when I first started: that you shouldn't repeat a success. Very often you're going to, and maybe the first time you do, it works. And you love it. But then you're trapped.
Jack Nicholson

If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or 'our' country, let it be understood soberly and rationally between us that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits where I have not shared and probably will not share.
Virginia Woolf

It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.
Marcel Proust

Our most tragic error may have been our inability to establish a rapport and a confidence with the press and television with the communication media. I don't think the press has understood me.
Lyndon B. Johnson

Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood.
Henry Miller

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

If anybody says he can think about quantum physics without getting giddy, that only shows he has not understood the first thing about them.
Niels Bohr

If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet.
Niels Bohr

Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question.
Niels Bohr

I write to understand as much as to be understood.
Elie Wiesel

I have suffered from being misunderstood, but I would have suffered a hell of a lot more if I had been understood.
Clarence Darrow

Equality, rightly understood as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences; wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.
Barry Goldwater

The triple is the most exciting play in baseball. Home runs win a lot of games, but I never understood why fans are so obsessed with them.
Hank Aaron

Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly; for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood.
William Penn

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.
Marie Curie

I think there's a form of honesty, because I used to be very honest with the press, and then it backfired on me, and I understood it.
Shia LaBeouf