In order to really understand, we need to listen, not reply. We need to listen long and attentively. In order to help anybody to open his heart we have to give him time, asking only a few questions, as carefully as possible in order to help him better explain his experience.
Interpretation
True understanding comes from listening rather than responding.
This quote emphasizes the importance of attentive listening in fostering understanding and connection with others. Paul Tournier suggests that to help someone express their feelings, we must prioritize patience and the art of asking thoughtful questions, allowing them the space to share their experiences fully.
In practice
In a counseling session to encourage a client to share their feelings.
It is quite clear that between love and understanding there is a very close link...He who loves understands, and he who understands loves. One who feels understood feels loved, and one who feels loved feels sure of being understood.
That is what marriage really means; helping one another to reach the full status of being persons, responsible and autonomous beings who do not run away from life.
What happens then is like what happens when we separate a jigsaw puzzle into its fuve hundred pieces: The over-all picture disappears. This is the state of modern medicine: It has lost the sense of the unity of man. Such is the price it has paid for its scientific progress. It has sacrificed art to science.
Acceptance of one's life has nothing to do with resignation; it does not mean running away from the struggle. On the contrary, it means accepting it as it comes, with all the handicaps of heredity, of suffering, of psychological complexes and injustices.
The experience of being in between-between the time we leave home and arrive at our destination; between the time we leave adolescence and arrive at adulthood; between the time we leave doubt and arrive at faith. It is like the time when a trapeze artist lets go the bars and hangs in midair, ready to catch another support: it is a time of danger, of expectation, of uncertainty, of excitement, or extraordinary aliveness.
The most tragic consequence of our criticism of a man is to block his way to humiliation and grace, precisely to drive him into the mechanisms of self justification and into his faults instead of freeing him from them. For him, our voice drowns the voice of God.
Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.
Three months before he died, I began to steal things from my father's house. I wandered around barefoot and slipped objects into my pockets. I took blush, toothpaste, two chipped finger bowls in celadon blue, a bottle of nail polish, a pair of worn patent-leather ballet slippers, and four faded white pillowcases the color of old teeth.
I don't believe in marriage. It's bloody impractical. 'To love, honor, and obey.' If it weren't, you wouldn't have to sign a contract.
I'm re-energized by being around people who mean a lot to me.
Nobody likes being alone that much. I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all. It just leads to disappointment.
I believe that it is impossible for two individuals not committed to their own and each other’s well being to sustain a healthy and enduring relationship.
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