How to Know a Person Quotes

“The real act of, say, building a friendship or creating a community involves performing a series of small, concrete social actions well: disagreeing without poisoning the relationship; revealing vulnerability at the appropriate pace; being a good listener; knowing how to end a conversation gracefully; knowing how to ask for and offer forgiveness; knowing how to let someone down without breaking their heart; knowing how to sit with someone who is suffering; knowing how to host a gathering where everyone feels embraced; knowing how to see things from another’s point of view.”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“The greatest thing a person does is to take the lessons of life, the hard knocks of life, the surprises of life, and the mundane realities of life and refine their own consciousness so that they can gradually come to see the world with more understanding, more wisdom, more humanity, and more grace.”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“The worst kinds of questions are the ones that don’t involve a surrender of power, that evaluate: Where did you go to college? What neighborhood do you live in? What do you do? They imply, “I’m about to judge you.” Closed questions are also bad questions. Instead of surrendering power, the questioner is imposing a limit on how the question can be answered. For example, if you mention your mother and I ask, “Were you close?,” then I’ve limited your description of your relationship with your mother to the close/distant frame. It’s better to ask, “How is your mother?” That gives the answerer the freedom to go as deep or as shallow as he wants. A third sure way to shut down conversations is to ask vague questions, like “How’s it going?” or “What’s up?” These questions are impossible to answer. They’re another way of saying, “I’m greeting you, but I don’t actually want you to answer.” Humble questions are open-ended. They’re encouraging the other person to take control and take the conversation where they want it to go. These are questions that begin with phrases like “How did you…,” “What’s it like…,” “Tell me about…,” and “In what ways…” In her book You’re Not Listening, Kate Murphy describes a focus group moderator who was trying to understand why people go to the grocery store late at night. Instead of directly asking, “Why do you go to grocery”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“She who only looks inward will find only chaos, and she who looks outward with the eyes of critical judgment will find only flaws. But she who looks with the eyes of compassion and understanding will see complex souls, suffering and soaring, navigating life as best they can.”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“When you’re practicing Illuminationism, you’re offering a gaze that says, “I want to get to know you and be known by you.” It’s a gaze that positively answers the question everybody is unconsciously asking themselves when they meet you: “Am I a person to you? Do you care about me? Am I a priority for you?” The answers to those questions are conveyed in your gaze before they are conveyed by your words. It’s a gaze that radiates respect. It’s a gaze that says that every person I meet is unique, unrepeatable, and, yes, superior to me in some way. Every person I meet is fascinating on some topic. If I approach you in this respectful way, I’ll know that you are not a puzzle that can be solved but a mystery that can never be gotten to the bottom of. I’ll do you the honor of suspending judgment and letting you be as you are.”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“A person who is looking for beauty is likely to find wonders, while a person looking for threats will find danger. A person who beams warmth brings out the glowing sides of the people she meets, while a person who conveys formality can meet the same people and find them stiff and detached.”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them,” George Bernard Shaw wrote, “but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity.”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“Even when you know someone well, I find that if you don’t talk about the little things on a regular basis, it’s hard to talk about the big things.”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“What crossroads are you at?” At any moment, most of us are in the middle of some transition. The question helps people focus on theirs. “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” Most people know that fear plays some role in their life, but they haven’t clearly defined how fear is holding them back. “If you died tonight, what would you regret not doing?” “If we meet a year from now, what will we be celebrating?” “If the next five years is a chapter in your life, what is that chapter about?” “Can you be yourself where you are and still fit in?”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“Our schools and other institutions have focused more and more on preparing people for their careers, but not on the skills of being considerate toward the person next to you. The humanities, which teach us what goes on in the minds of other people, have become marginalized.”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“On social media you can have the illusion of social contact without having to perform the gestures that actually build trust, care, and affection. On social media, stimulation replaces intimacy. There is judgment everywhere and understanding nowhere.”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“The quality of your life depends quite a bit on the quality of attention you project out onto the world.”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“The most important part of your life is ahead of you, not behind you.”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“Perhaps to really know another person, you have to have a glimmer of how they experience the world. To really know someone, you have to know how they know you.”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“In his book Consolations, the essayist and poet David Whyte observed that the ultimate touchstone of friendship “is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“A good conversation is an act of joint exploration. Somebody floats a half-formed idea. Somebody else seizes on the nub of the idea, plays with it, offers her own perspective based on her own memories, and floats it back so the other person can respond. A good conversation sparks you to have thoughts you never had before. A good conversation starts in one place and ends up in another.”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“Human beings are like rivers; the water is one and the same in all of them but every river is narrow in some places, flows swifter in others; here it is broad, there still, or clear, or cold, or muddy or warm. It is the same with men. Every man bears within him the germs of every human quality, and now manifests one, now another, and frequently he is quite unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“Successful friendship, like successful therapy, is a balance of deference and defiance. It involves showing positive regard, but also calling people on their self-deceptions. The Buddhists have a useful phrase for unconditional positive regard: “idiot compassion,” which is the kind of empathy that never challenges people’s stories or threatens to hurt their feelings. It consoles but also conceals.”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“Aldous Huxley captured the core reality: “Experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you.” —”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“The psychologist Daniel Gilbert has a famous saying about this: “Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they are finished.”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“Humble questions are open-ended. They’re encouraging the other person to take control and take the conversation where they want it to go. These are questions that begin with phrases like “How did you…,” “What’s it like…,” “Tell me about…,” and “In what ways…” In her book You’re Not Listening, Kate Murphy describes a focus group moderator who was trying to understand why people go to the grocery store late at night. Instead of directly asking, “Why do you go to grocery stores late,” which can sound accusatory, she asked, “Tell me about the last time you went to the store after 11:00 p.m.”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“As the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett writes in her book How Emotions Are Made, “You may think that in everyday life, the things you see and hear influence what you feel, but it’s mostly the other way around: What you feel alters your sight and hearing.” People who are scared take in a scene differently. Our ears, for example, immediately adjust to focus on high and low frequencies—a scream or a growl—rather than midrange frequencies, which include normal human speech. Anxiety narrows our attention and diminishes our peripheral vision. A feeling of happiness, by contrast, widens our peripheral vision. A person who feels safe because of the reliable and empathetic presence of others will see the world as a wider, more open, and happier place.

The people who practice effective empathy have suffered in ways that give them understanding and credibility.”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“Constructionism is the recognition, backed up by the last half century of brain research, that people don’t passively take in reality. Each person actively constructs their own perception of reality. That’s not to say there is not an objective reality out there. It’s to say that we have only subjective access to it. “The mind is its own place,” the poet John Milton wrote, “and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“Wise people don’t just possess information; they possess a compassionate understanding of other people. They know about life.”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“Attention,” the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist writes, “is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being.”1 The quality of your life depends quite a bit on the quality of attention you project out onto the world.”
― David Brooks, How To Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“When I was young, I wanted to be knowledgeable, but as I got older, I wanted to be wise. Wise people don’t just possess information; they possess a compassionate understanding of other people. They know about life.”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“Recently I was at a dinner with a political scientist who put down his fork and said to the four of us: “I’m eighty. What should I do with the rest of my life?” That was a really humble but big question to ask. Essentially, he was asking, “What is the best way to grow old?” We started talking about his values, the questions he wanted to ask in his future research, how anyone should spend the final years of their life. It was fantastic.”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“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. They want to understand what you were feeling when your boss told you that you were being laid off. Was your first thought “How will I tell my family?” Was your dominant emotion dread, humiliation, or perhaps relief? Then a good conversationalist will ask how you’re experiencing now what you experienced then. In retrospect, was getting laid off a complete disaster, or did it send you off on a new path that you’re now grateful for?”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“Or, as the writer Anaïs Nin put it, “We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen