Misunderstood Quotes

“I'm a misunderstood genius."
"What's misunderstood?"
"Nobody thinks I'm a genius.”
― Bill Watterson

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series

“All I wanted was to live a life where I could be me, and be okay with that. I had no need for material possessions, money or even close friends with me on my journey. I never understood people very well anyway, and they never seemed to understand me very well either. All I wanted was my art and the chance to be the creator of my own world, my own reality. I wanted the open road and new beginnings every day.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“When you're the only sane person, you look like the only insane person.”
― Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality

“True rebels hate their own rebellion. They know by experience that it is not a cool and glamorous lifestyle; it takes a courageous fool to say things that have not been said and to do things that have not been done.”
― Criss Jami, Venus in Arms

“When good people consider you the bad guy, you develop a heart to help the bad ones. You actually understand them.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Mental illness

People assume you aren’t sick
unless they see the sickness on your skin
like scars forming a map of all the ways you’re hurting.

My heart is a prison of Have you tried?s
Have you tried exercising? Have you tried eating better?
Have you tried not being sad, not being sick?
Have you tried being more like me?
Have you tried shutting up?

Yes, I have tried. Yes, I am still trying,
and yes, I am still sick.

Sometimes monsters are invisible, and
sometimes demons attack you from the inside.
Just because you cannot see the claws and the teeth
does not mean they aren’t ripping through me.
Pain does not need to be seen to be felt.

Telling me there is no problem
won’t solve the problem.

This is not how miracles are born.
This is not how sickness works.”
― Emm Roy, The First Step

“Friends ask you questions; enemies question you.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“Creative people are often found either disagreeable or intimidating by mediocrities.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Believe me, I know what it's like to feel all alone...the worst kind of loneliness in the world is the isolation that comes from being misunderstood, It can make people lose their grasp on reality.”
― Dan Brown, Inferno

“Jonathan sighed. The price of being misunderstood, he thought. They call you devil or they call you god.”
― Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull

“In order to share one's true brilliance one initially has to risk looking like a fool: genius is like a wheel that spins so fast, it at first glance appears to be sitting still.”
― Criss Jami, Venus in Arms

“What people don't understand about depression is how much it hurts. It's like your brain is convinced that it's dying and produces an acid that eats away at you from the inside, until all that's less is a scary hollowness. Your mind fills with dark thoughts; you become convinced that your friends secretly hate you, you're worthless, and then there's no hope. I never got so low as to consider ending it all, but I understand how that can happen to some people. Depression simply hurts too much.”
― Tyler Hamilton

“The point was to learn what it was we feared more: being misunderstood or being betrayed.”
― Adam Levin, The Instructions

“When the person you love can't see your love for them beneath the painful things you say when they reject you, remember this: Love is blind.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Her complexity is a glorious fire that consumes, while her simplicity goes unapproachable. But if one takes time to understand her, there is something beautiful to find, something simple to be loved. But she goes unloved, for being misunderstood.”
― Anthony Liccione

“I'm often painted as the bad guy, and the artistic part of me wants to hand out the brush.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“The most thoroughly and relentlessly damned, banned, excluded, condemned, forbidden, ostracized, ignored, suppressed, repressed, robbed, brutalized and defamed of all 'Damned Things' is the individual human being. The social engineers, statisticians, psychologists, sociologists, market researchers, landlords, bureaucrats, captains of industry, bankers, governors, commissars, kings and presidents are perpetually forcing this 'Damned Thing' into carefully prepared blueprints and perpetually irritated that the 'Damned Thing' will not fit into the slot assigned it. The theologians call it a sinner and try to reform it. The governor calls it a criminal and tries to punish it. The psychologist calls it a neurotic and tries to cure it. Still, the 'Damned Thing' will not fit into their slots.”
― Robert Anton Wilson

“They are so caught up in their happiness that they don't realize I'm not really a part of it. I am wandering along the periphery. I am like the people in the Winslow Homer paintings, sharing the same room with them but not really there. I am like the fish in the aquarium, thinking in a different language, adapting to a life that's not my natural habitat. I am the people in the other cars, each with his or her own story, but passing too quickly to be noticed or understood.

. . . There are moments I just sit in my frame, float in my tank, ride in my car and say nothing, think nothing that connects me to anything at all.”
― David Levithan, Every Day

“The humble sinner will sometimes be interpreted as one of the filthiest in the eyes of man yet immersed in the eyes of God, and this is due to the volition of honesty regarding his own corruption.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Misunderstood! It is a right fool's word. Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance and Other Essays

“Oftentimes in reality, the genius is in the position of the antihero. Neither the good guys nor the bad guys really trust him because his truth is universal.”
― Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality

“Even if there are instances in which the onlookers mistook it, never fool yourself into using misunderstood genius as an excuse to be a fool.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Nothing in this world is complicated, only misunderstood.”
― Chloe Gong, Our Violent Ends

“What a fool she was ever to have imagined that there might be some place in the world where she could sink to the earth with the knowledge that there were people round her who understood, who perhaps even admired and loved her! She was fated to carry loneliness about with her as a leper carries his scabs. 'No one can do anything for me: no one can do anything against me.”
― François Mauriac, Thérèse Desqueyroux

“At that time, I well remember whatever could excite - certain accidents of the weather, for instance, were almost dreaded by me, because they woke the being I was always lulling, and stirred up a craving cry I could not satisfy. One night a thunder-storm broke; a sort of hurricane shook us in our beds: the Catholics rose in panic and prayed to their saints. As for me, the tempest took hold of me with tyranny: I was roughly roused and obliged to live. I got up and dressed myself, and creeping outside the basement close by my bed, sat on its ledge, with my feet on the roof of a lower adjoining building. It was wet, it was wild, it was pitch dark. Within the dormitory they gathered round the night-lamp in consternation, praying loud. I could not go in: too resistless was the delight of staying with the wild hour, black and full of thunder, pealing out such an ode as language never delivered to man - too terribly glorious, the spectacle of clouds, split and pierced by white and blinding bolts.”
― Charlotte Brontë

“Communication is the one class no one graduates from. Even the wisest man's words will be misinterpreted by a fool.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“The best people are always the worst. They drive everyone mad by being so good at second-guessing everything bad.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“As for those who spite you, and seemingly just because, it's only evident that they're learning from you. Maybe you taste bad - kind of like medicine, kind of like truth - and to them, you're thought unsafe. There is flattery in being chewed out and spit up. Humans have always had a hard time digesting foreign things.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“The most terrible loneliness is not the kind that comes from being alone, but the kind that comes from being misunderstood. It is the loneliness of standing in a crowded room, surrounded by people who do not see you, who do not hear you, who do not know the true essence of who you are. And in that loneliness, you feel as though you are fading, disappearing into the background, until you are nothing more than a ghost, a shadow of your former self.”
― George Orwell