The important thing is not whatever nonsense the voices are saying, but what the voices are feeling.
Interpretation
The essence of understanding lies in the emotions behind words, not just the words themselves.
In this quote, John Green emphasizes the significance of emotional context over literal interpretation. He suggests that while external opinions or criticisms may seem trivial, the underlying feelings they convey are of much greater importance, highlighting the need to empathize and comprehend the true sentiments that drive people's words or actions.
In practice
In a classroom discussion about the importance of emotional intelligence.
Always' was a promise! How can you just break the promise?" "Sometimes people don't always understand the promises they're making when they make them," I said. Isaac shot me a look. "Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That's what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway. Don't you believe in true love?" I didn't answer. I didn't have an answer. But I thought that if true love did exist, that was a pretty good definition of it.
Augustus Waters was the great star-crossed love of my life. Ours was an epic love story, and I won’t be able to get more than a sentence into it without disappearing into a puddle of tears. Gus knew. Gus knows. I will not tell you our love story, because—like all real love stories—it will die with us, as it should.
I find it really offensive when people say that the emotional experiences of teenagers are less real or less important than those of adults. I am an adult, and I used to be a teenager, and so I can tell you with some authority that my feelings then were as real as my feelings are now.
I don't think pandemics make us afraid of death, I think they make us afraid of oblivion. They force us to grapple with the futility of effort. Also they make us barf which isn't fun either... Wash your hands, cover your coughs, and find a way to hold in balance the futility of effort with the necessity to struggle.
So often we try to make other people feel better by minimizing their pain, by telling them that it will get better (which it will) or that there are worse things in the world (which there are). But that's not what I actually needed. What I actually needed was for someone to tell me that it hurt because it mattered. I have found this very useful to think about over the years, and I find that it is a lot easier and more bearable to be sad when you aren't constantly berating yourself for being sad.
We kiss. Her hands are freezing on my face, and she tastes like coffee and the smell of the onion is still stuck in my nose, and my lips are all dry from the endless winter. And it's awesome.
You must purge yourself before finding faults in others.
As meditation goes deep you will feel less and less desires, more and more contentment with whatsoever you have. There will be less and less desire for that which you don't have, and more and more contentment with whatsoever you have. As meditation goes deeper, a very contented consciousness evolves. Ultimately there is no desire, only contentment.
What makes a genius? The ability to see. To see what? The butterfly in a caterpillar, the eagle in an egg, the saint in a selfish person, life in death, unity in separation, God in the human and human in God and suffering as the form in which the incomprehensibility of God himself appears.
Women are like tea bags: put them in hot water and they get stronger.
Some years ago there was a study to discover the most stressful occupation. It turned out not to be the head of a large business, football manager or prime minister, but rather: bus driver.
It is awfully hard work doing nothing.
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