How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

by David Brooks

You can be loved by a person yet not be known by them.

The quality of your life depends quite a bit on the quality of attention you project out onto the world.

Respect is a gift you offer with your eyes.

always treat human beings as an end in themselves, and not as a means to something

An education in human variety prepares you to welcome new people into your life.

“Experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you.”

Good conversationalists ask for stories about specific events or experiences, and then they go even further. They don’t only want to talk about what happened, they want to know how you experienced what happened.

good conversationalist controls her impatience and listens to learn, rather than to respond.

most elementary schools began to abandon moral formation in the 1940s and 1950s and “by the 1960s deliberate moral education was in full-scale retreat.”

any conversation, respect is like air. When it’s present nobody notices, but when it’s absent it’s all anybody can think about.

“We perceive the world, not as it is but as it is for us.”

“How did you come to believe X?” This is a framing that invites people to tell a story about what events led them to think the way they do.

“Tell me about the person who shaped your values most.”

In every life there is a pattern, a story line running through it all. We find that story when somebody gives an opportunity to tell it.

To see a person well, you have to see them as culture inheritors and as culture creators.