"The rocks in the water don't know how the rocks in the sun feel." -Haitian Proverb

The quote "The rocks in the water don't know how the rocks in the sun feel" is a great way to express how we could never fully understand what it is like to be another person if we simply judge them with no evidence of their past.  The "rocks in the water" would never know how the  "rocks in the sun" feel because they come from completely different places.  When confronting somebody new, it is natural to judge the person by their appearance or the way they act.  But why is that?  We don't know anything about them, yet we seem to generalize who this person is by first impressions.  In order to truely judge someone, one would have to know everything about the person.  They would have to look deeper than their outside appearances and really take time to understand where they are coming from.
This quote does a great job of depicting how two people, coming from different worlds, can be vastly different due to their environment and how they were raised.  My friend Manuel and I are a perfect example of this.  Manuel lived in Mexico for most of his life and moved here about two years ago.  Because he was different from everybody else, it was really hard for him to make friends at school.  I, at first, thought he was a little strange but as I got to know him and understand where he was coming from, it became easier to figure him out as a whole and we eventually became very good friends.
A similar quote to this is "You can never truely understand someone untill you walk in their shoes.".  It focuses on the same issue of coming from different worlds and never really understanding what a person is all about untill you take time to fully understand them.  There is a lot of misunderstanding in this world, and these quotes do a great job of trying to fix those problems.  If everybody lived by these quotes, the world would surely be a better place.