Albert Schweitzer Quotes

I'm constantly astounded by the way people talk so openly to someone they don't know. They clarify in their own minds what is important to them, discover another person has similar problems, and create trust and even a friendship.

You can only love and be loved to the extent that you know and are known by somebody.

Why is it so unutterably beneficial, the thought that someone besides myself knows me?

We can only learn to love by loving.

Since loving is about knowing, we have more meaningful love relationships when we know each other and it takes time to know each other.

A relationship is based on communication.

When you are in someone's home, in their bed, you see the world from their eyes. You understand 'the other' is not so other.

Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough. Not only have I found that when I talk to the little flower or to the little peanut they will give up their secrets, but I have found that when I silently commune with people, they give up their secrets also - if you love them enough.

That's always what I've tried to do. I've tried to communicate. But at the end of the day, it's still for you to understand something. Understand that the world is bigger than you.

What a wonderful thing it is to have a good friend. He identifies your innermost desires, and spares you the embarrassment of disclosing them to him yourself.

Somehow I knew that no matter what I chose to tell or to keep secret, he would understand.

Sir, when two people have the extraordinary quality of this state, words are not necessary. Where that quality of love exists, words become unnecessary. There is instant communication.

He glanced back at the wall. How like a mirror, too, her face. Impossible; for how many people did you know who reflected your own light to you? People were more often--he searched for a simile, found one in his work--torches, blazing away until they whiffed out. How rarely did other people's faces take of you and throw back to you your own expression, your own innermost trembling thought?

In the end the listening exposes you even more than it exposes the people you're trying to listen to.

Communication leads to community that is, to understanding, intimacy, and the mutual valuing that was previously lacking. Community can be defined simply as a group in which free conversation can take place. Community is where I can share my innermost thoughts, bring out the depths of my own feelings, and know they will be understood.

Only if there is love, if hearts are opened, can one person truly know the other.

She curled up and pressed her cheek against his chest. Her ear was right above his heart. She was listening to his thoughts. "I need to know this," Aomame said. "That we're in the same world, seeing the same things.

Empathy is a special way of coming to know another and ourself, a kind of attuning and understanding. When empathy is extended, it satisfies our needs and wish for intimacy, it rescues us from our feelings of aloneness.

there's nothing more intimate in life than simply being understood. And understanding someone else.

Compassion is not pity ... compassion never considers an object as weak or inferior. Compassion, one might say, works from a strength born of awareness of shared weakness, and not from someone else's weakness. And from the awareness of the mutuality of us all. Thus to put down another as in pity is to put down oneself.

There are days when the great are near us, when there is no frown on their brow, no condescension even; when they take us by the hand, and we share their thought.

We all have different things that make us strong and weak, but if we communicate and we really open ourselves and open our hearts, you're going to be amazed by the things that you can learn.

I know when I listen to people speak and they share their weaknesses, I'm listening, because I can resonate.

It sounds cliche, but communication is the number one way to keep a relationship solid.

We all want to believe in the magic of someone knowing what we're thinking.