Levin had often noticed in arguments between the most intelligent people that after enormous efforts, an enormous number of logical subtleties and words, the arguers would finally come to the awareness that what they had spent so long struggling to prove to each other had been known to them long, long before, from the beginning of the argument, but that they had loved different things, and therefore did not want to name what they loved, so as not to be challenged.

—Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Book IV, chapter XIII, 1877

A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.

—Paul Simon, “The Boxer,” 1970