The language of friendship is not words but meanings
Source: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)
Topic
Spinoza's instruction — do not weep, do not be indignant, understand — sets the standard that very few of the other quotes actually meet, which is itself instructive. Kierkegaard repeats his observation that life can only be understood backwards while lived forwards. Einstein: you understand something when you can explain it to your grandmother. Montaigne finds that a good marriage resembles friendship more than love. James acknowledges that hearts, not understandings, govern most decisions regardless of what people claim. The collection returns persistently to the gap between what we say we understand and what we have actually worked through — and the useful discomfort of noticing that the gap is usually wider than we assumed.
The language of friendship is not words but meanings
Talking with a friend is nothing else but thinking aloud
One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other
Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believed