"In my long and colorful career, one thing stands out: I have been misunderstood."
Misunderstood quotes
Misunderstood
233 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Misunderstood quotes (page 3 of 12)
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"The role of Ronald Reagan had been deliberately diminished; the role of the Europeans, who, with the exception of Helmet Kohl, were often keen to undermine America when it mattered, had been sanitized; and the role of Mr. Gorbachev, who had failed spectacularly in his declared objective of saving communism and the Soviet Union, had been absurdly misunderstood."
"Heaping glowing coals on another person's head is usually misunderstood and comes to nothing because the other person knows just as well that he is in the right and has also given some thought on his own part to heaping coals."
"At the bottom of all these noble races the beast of prey, the splendid blond beast, prowling about avidly in search of spoil and victory."
"Invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood."
"I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you're going to innovate."
"Michael Jackson? He was something more (than one of my favorite entertainers), a true friend. He wasn't just a genius. Above all, he was a good person, who gave so much. He gave people values, he encouraged them to better themselves all the time. He was far deeper and more authentic than people could see. He was misunderstood too many times"
"The theory of punctuated equilibrium, proposed by Niles Eldredge and myself, is not, as so often misunderstood, a radical claim for truly sudden change, but a recognition that ordinary processes of speciation, properly conceived as glacially slow by the standard of our own life-span, do not resolve into geological time as long sequences of insensibly graded intermediates (the traditional, or gradualistic, view), but as geologically "sudden" origins at single bedding planes."
"The sound universe is also spectacular around here. In the evenings there's a cricket orchestra with frogs providing the bass line. In the dead of night the dogs howl about how misunderstood they are. Before dawn the roosters for miles around announce how freaking cool it is to be roosters."
"I'm not conditioned to be an entertainer. An entertainer pleases others while an artist only has to please himself. The problem with that is artists are misunderstood by all. I'm not interested in the clarinet but in music. we speak our emotions into music. An artist should write for himself and not for an audience. If the audience likes it, great. If not, they can keep away. My situation is the same. Let them concentrate on my music and not on me. I like the music. I love it and live it, in fact. But for me, the business part of music just plain stinks."
"I am the most misunderstood and misrepresented of men. Misrepresented because misunderstood."
"The nature of spiritual awakening is frequently misunderstood. The adoption of spiritual beliefs, seeing visions of God or celestial beings, the ability to channel, to heal, to foretell the future, or other paranormal powers - all such phenomena are of value and are not to be dismissed, but none of them is in itself indicative of spiritual awakening in a person who experiences them."
"The man who stands by and says nothing, when the peril of his government is discussed, can not be misunderstood. If not hindered, he is sure to help the enemy."
"If you lack the power to demoralize yourself along with the age, to go as low and as far, do not complain of being misunderstood by it."
"My greatest fear is to be misunderstood."
"To refrain from storytelling is perhaps one of the highest forms of respect we can pay. Those people, with no stories to circle them, can die without being misunderstood."
"I am conscious of the fact that the subject of hell is not a very pleasant one. It is very unpopular, controversial and misunderstood.... As a minister, I must deal with it. I cannot ignore it."
"It's easy to look at the vampires as a metaphor for any feared or misunderstood group. It's also easy to look at them as a metaphor for a shadow organization that says one thing and has a completely different agenda on their mind, and anybody who gets in their way, they just get rid of them. Does that sound familiar?"
"To be gret is to be misunderstood."
"To be great, you must be misunderstood"