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

Book by David Brooks · 45 quotes · Understanding, Empathy, Relationships

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

“Human beings evolved to live in small bands with people more or less like themselves. But today, many of us live in wonderfully pluralistic societies. In America, Europe, India, and many other places, we're trying to build mass multicultural democracies, societies that contain people from diverse races and ethnicities, with different ideologies and backgrounds. To survive, pluralistic societies require citizens who can look across difference and show the kind of understanding that is a prerequisite of trust—who can say, at the very least, “I’m beginning to see you. Certainly, I will never fully experience the world as you experience it, but I’m beginning, a bit, to see the world through your eyes.”

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“So far I’ve been describing a process of getting to know someone as if we live in normal times. I’ve been writing as if we live in a healthy cultural environment, in a society in which people are enmeshed in thick communities and webs of friendship, trust, and belonging. We don’t live in such a society. We live in an environment in which political animosities, technological dehumanization, and social breakdown undermine connection, strain friendships, erase intimacy, and foster distrust. We’re living in the middle of some sort of vast emotional, relational, and spiritual crisis. It is as if people across society have lost the ability to see and understand one another, thus producing a culture that can be brutalizing and isolating.”

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“There is no way to make hard conversations un-hard. You can never fully understand a person whose life experience is very different from your own. I will never know what it is like to be Black, to be a woman, to be Gen Z, to be born with a disability, to be a working-class man, to be a new immigrant or a person from any of a myriad of other life experiences. There are mysterious depths to each person. There are vast differences between different cultures, before which we need to stand with respect and awe. Nevertheless, I have found that if you work on your skills—your capacity to see and hear others—you really can get a sense of another person’s perspective. And I have found that it is quite possible to turn distrust into trust, to build mutual respect.”

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“For people who feel disrespected and unseen, politics is a seductive form of social therapy. Politics seems to offer a comprehensible moral landscape. We, the children of light, are facing off against them, the children of darkness. Politics seems to offer a sense of belonging. I am on the barricades with the other members of my tribe. Politics seems to offer an arena of moral action. To be moral in this world, you don’t have to feed the hungry or sit with the widow. You just have to be liberal or conservative, you just have to feel properly enraged at the people you find contemptible. Over the past decade, everything has become politicized. Churches, universities, sports, food selection, movie awards shows, late-night comedy— they have all turned into political arenas. Except this was not politics as it is normally understood. Healthy societies produce the politics of distribution. How should the resources of the society be allocated? Unhappy societies produce the politics of recognition. Political movements these days are fueled largely by resentment, by a person or a group’s feelings that society does not respect or recognize them. The goal of political and media personalities is to produce episodes in which their side is emotionally validated and the other side is emotionally shamed. The person practicing the politics of recognition is not trying to formulate domestic policies or to address this or that social ill; he is trying to affirm his identity, to gain status and visibility, to find a way to admire himself. But, of course, the politics of recognition doesn’t actually give you community and connection. People join partisan tribes, but they are not in fact meeting together, serving one another, befriending one another. Politics doesn’t make you a better person; it’s about outer agitation, not inner formation. Politics doesn’t humanize. If you attempt to assuage your sadness, loneliness, or anomie through politics, it will do nothing more than land you in a world marked by a sadistic striving for domination. You may try to escape a world of isolation and moral meaninglessness, only to find yourself in the pulverizing destructiveness of the culture wars.”

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“Every society possesses what the philosopher Axel Honneth calls a “recognition order.” This is the criteria used to confer respect and recognition on some people and not others. In our society, we confer huge amounts of recognition on those with beauty, wealth, or prestigious educational affiliations, and millions feel invisible, unrecognized, and left out.”

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“For [Iris] Murdoch, the essential immoral act is the inability to see other people correctly. Human beings, she finds, are self-centered beings, anxiety-ridden and resentful. We are constantly representing people to ourselves in self-serving ways, in ways that gratify our egos and serve our ends. We stereotype and condescend, ignore and dehumanize. And because we don’t see people accurately, we treat them wrongly. Evil happens when people are unseeing, when they don’t recognize the personhood in other human beings.”

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“Sadness, lack of recognition, and loneliness turn into bitterness. When people believe that their identity is unrecognized, it feels like injustice—because it is. People who have been treated unjustly often lash out, seek ways to humiliate those who they feel have humiliated them. Loneliness thus leads to meanness. As the saying goes, pain that is not transformed gets transmitted.”

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“I've also read hundreds of memoirs and spoken with thousands of people about their own singular lives, and I'm here to tell you that each particular life is far more astounding and unpredictable than any of the generalizations scholars and social scientists make about groups of people. If you want to understand humanity, you have to focus on the thoughts and emotions of individuals, not just data about groups.”

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“One of the reasons hard conversations are necessary is that we have to ask other people the obvious questions - How do you see this? - if we're going to have any hope of entering, even a bit, into their point of view. Our differences of perception are rooted deep in the hidden kingdom of the unconscious mind and we're generally not aware how profound those differences are until we ask.”

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“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.”

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“We all know people who are smart. But that doesn’t mean they are wise. Understanding and wisdom come from surviving the pitfalls of life, thriving in life, having wide and deep contact with other people. Out of your own moments of suffering, struggle, friendship, intimacy, and joy comes a compassionate awareness of how other people feel—their frailty, their confusion, and their courage. The wise are those who have lived full, varied lives, and reflected deeply on what they’ve been through.”

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“The wise person is there not to be walked over but to stand up for the actual truth, to call the other person out when need be, if they are hiding from some hard reality. “Receptivity without confrontation leads to a bland neutrality that serves nobody,” the theologian Henri Nouwen wrote. “Confrontation without receptivity leads to an oppressive aggression which hurts everybody.”

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“There’s one more thing that happens as I listen to life stories. I realize I’m not just listening to other people’s stories; I’m helping them create their stories. Very few of us sit down one day and write out the story of our lives and then go out and recite it when somebody asks. For most of us it’s only when somebody asks us to tell a story about ourselves that we have to step back and organize the events and turn them into a coherent narrative. When you ask somebody to tell part of their story, you’re giving them an occasion to take that step back. You’re giving them an opportunity to construct an account of themselves and maybe see themselves in a new way. None of us can have an identity unless it is affirmed and acknowledged by others. So as you are telling me your story, you’re seeing the ways I affirm you and the ways I do not. You’re sensing the parts of the story that work and those that do not. If you feed me empty slogans about yourself, I withdraw. But if you stand more transparently before me, showing both your warts and your gifts, you feel my respectful and friendly gaze upon you, and that brings forth growth. 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.”

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“The lecture halls of the world are filled with senior citizens who seek greater knowledge and wisdom. The explanatory drive that was there when they were babies is still there now. Wisdom at this phase of life is the ability to see the connections between things. It’s the ability to hold opposite truths—contradictions and paradoxes—in the mind at the same time, without wrestling to impose some linear order. It’s the ability to see things from multiple perspectives.”

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“I’ve come to believe that wise people don’t tell us what to do; they start by witnessing our story. They take the anecdotes, rationalizations, and episodes we tell, and see us in a noble struggle. They see the way we’re navigating the dialectics of life—intimacy versus independence, control versus uncertainty— and understand that our current self is just where we are right now, part of a long continuum of growth. The really good confidants—the people we go to when we are troubled—are more like coaches than philosopher-kings. They take in your story, accept it, but push you to clarify what it is you really want, or to name the baggage you left out of your clean tale. They ask you to probe into what is really bothering you, to search for the deeper problem underneath the convenient surface problem you’ve come to them for help about. Wise people don’t tell you what to do; they help you process your own thoughts and emotions. They enter with you into your process of meaning-making and then help you expand it, push it along. All choice involves loss: If you take this job, you don’t take that one. Much of life involves reconciling opposites: I want to be attached, but I also want to be free. Wise people create a safe space where you can navigate the ambiguities and contradictions we all wrestle with. They prod and lure you along until your own obvious solution emerges into view. Their essential gift is receptivity, the capacity to receive what you are sending. This is not a passive skill. The wise person is not just keeping her ears open. She is creating an atmosphere of hospitality, an atmosphere in which people are encouraged to set aside their fear of showing weakness, their fear of confronting themselves. She is creating an atmosphere in which people swap stories, trade confidences. In this atmosphere people are free to be themselves, encouraged to be honest with themselves.”

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“Wise people help you come up with a different way of looking at yourself, your past, and the world around you. Very often they focus your attention on your relationships, the in-between spaces that are so easy to overlook. How can this friendship or this marriage be nourished and improved? The wise person sees your gifts and potential, even the ones you do not see. Being seen in this way has a tendency to turn down the pressure, offering you some distance from your immediate situation, offering hope.”

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“C. S. Lewis once observed that grief is not a state but a process. It’s a river that runs through a long valley, and at every turn a new landscape is revealed, and yet somehow it repeats and repeats. Periods of grief and suffering often shatter our basic assumptions about who we are and how life works. We tend to assume that the world is benevolent, that life is controllable, that things are supposed to make sense, that we are basically good people who deserve good things. Suffering and loss can blast all that to smithereens.”

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“As soon as somebody starts talking about times when they felt excluded, betrayed, or wronged, stop and listen. When somebody is talking to you about pain in their life, even in those cases when you may think their pain is performative or exaggerated, it’s best not to try to yank the conversations back to your frame. Your first job is to stay within the other person’s standpoint to more fully understand how the world looks to them. Your next job is to encourage them to go into more depth about what they have just said. “I want to understand your point of view as much as possible. What am I missing here?” Curiosity is the ability to explore something even in stressful and difficult circumstances. Remember that the person who is lower in any power structure than you are has a greater awareness of the situation than you do. A servant knows more about his master than the master knows about the servant. Someone who is being sat on knows a lot about the sitter—the way he shifts his weight and moves—whereas the sitter may not be aware that the sat-on person is even there.”

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“Why, over the past two decades, have we seen this epidemic of loneliness and meanness, this breakdown in the social fabric? We can all point to some contributing factors: social media, widening inequality, declining participation in community life, declining church attendance, rising populism and bigotry, vicious demagoguery from our media and political elites. I agree that these factors have all contributed to produce what we are enduring. But as the years have gone by, I have increasingly fixated on what I see as a deeper cause of our social and relational crisis. Our problem, I believe, is fundamentally moral. As a society, we have failed to teach the skills and cultivate the inclination to treat each other with kindness, generosity, and respect. I realize the phrase “moral formation” may sound stuffy and archaic, but moral formation is really about three simple, practical things. First, it is about helping people learn how to restrain their selfishness and incline their heart to care more about others. Second, it’s about helping people find a purpose, so their life has stability, direction, and meaning. Third, it’s about teaching the basic social and emotional skills so you can be kind and considerate to the people around you.”

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“But we don’t merely meet each other as unique individuals or in healthy social circumstances. We meet each other in the current atmosphere of disconnection and distrust. We meet each other as members of groups. We meet each other embedded in systems of power in which some groups have more and some groups have less. We meet each other in a society in which members of the red team and members of the blue team often stand apart and glare across metaphorical walls with bitterness and incomprehension. Our encounters are shaped by our historical inheritances—the legacies of slavery, elitism, sexism, prejudice, bigotry, and economic and social domination. You can’t get to know another person while pretending not to see ideology, class, race, faith, identity, or any of the other fraught social categories. These days, if you want to know someone well, you have to see the person in front of you as a distinct and never-to-be repeated individual. But you’ve also got to see that person as a member of their groups. And you’ve also got to see their social location—the way some people are insiders and other people are outsiders, how some sit on the top of society and some are marginalized to the fringes. The trick is to be able to see each person on these three levels all at once.”

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“The second crucial thing I learned, especially from the authors of Crucial Conversations, is that every conversation takes place on two levels: the official conversation and the actual conversation. The official conversation is represented by the words we say about whatever topic we are nominally discussing: politics, economics, workplace issues—whatever. The actual conversation occurs in the ebb and flow of underlying emotions that get transmitted as we talk. With every comment you are either making me feel a little more safe or a little more threatened. With every comment I am showing you either respect or disrespect. With every comment we are each revealing something about our intentions: Here is why I am telling you this. Here is why this is important to me. It is the volley of these underlying emotions that will determine the success or failure of the conversation.”

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“Repressing my own feelings became my default mode for moving through the world. I suppose I was driven by the usual causes: fear of intimacy; an intuition that if I really let my feelings flow, I wouldn't like what bubbled up; a fear of vulnerability; and a general social ineptitude.”

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“Being receptive means overcoming insecurities and self-preoccupation and opening yourself up to the experience of another. It means you resist the urge to project your own viewpoint; you do not ask, “How would I feel if I were in your shoes?” Instead, you are patiently ready for what the other person is offering. As the theologian Rowan Williams put it, we want our minds to be slack and attentive at the same time, the senses relaxed, open, and alive, the eyes tenderly poised.”

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“Understanding and wisdom come from surviving the pitfalls of life, thriving in life, having deep and wide contact with other people. Out of your own moments of suffering, struggle, friendship, intimacy, and joy comes a compassionate awareness of how other people feel - their frailty, their confusion, and their courage. The wise are those who have lived full, varied lives, and reflected deeply on what they’ve been through.”

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“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.”

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“Being a mediocre conversationalist is easy. Being a good conversationalist is hard. As I’ve tried to understand how to become a better conversationalist, I’ve found that I’ve had to overcome weird ideas about what a good conversationalist is like. A lot of people think a good conversationalist is someone who can tell funny stories. That’s a raconteur, but it’s not a conversationalist. A lot of people think a good conversationalist is someone who can offer piercing insights on a range of topics. That’s a lecturer, but not a conversationalist. A good conversationalist is a master of fostering a two-way exchange. A good conversationalist is capable of leading people on a mutual expedition toward understanding.”

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“If I’d been better schooled back then in the art of accompaniment, I would have understood how important it is to honor another person’s ability to make choices. I hope I would have understood, as good accompanists do, that everybody is in their own spot, on their own pilgrimage, and your job is to meet them where they are, help them chart their own course. I wish I had followed some advice that is rapidly becoming an adage: Let others voluntarily evolve. I wish I had understood then that trust is built when individual differences are appreciated, when mistakes are tolerated, and when one person says, more with facial expressions than anything else, “I’ll be there when you want me. I’ll be there when the time is right.” Accompaniment often involves a surrender of power that is beautiful to behold. A teacher could offer the answers, but he wants to walk with his students as they figure out how to solve a problem. A manager could give orders, but sometimes leadership means assisting employees as they become masters of their own task. A writer could blast out her opinions, but writers are at their best not when they tell people what to think but when they provide a context within which others can think. Pope Paul VI said it wonderfully: “Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it’s because they are witnesses.” Finally, a person who is good at accompaniment understands the art of presence. Presence is about showing up. Showing up at weddings and funerals, and especially showing up when somebody is grieving or has been laid off or has suffered some setback or humiliation. When someone is going through a hard time, you don’t need to say some wise thing; you just have to be there, with heightened awareness of what they are experiencing at that moment.”

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“Because I work at places like The New York Times, The Atlantic, and PBS, some people see me as a stand-in for the coastal elites, for the systems they believe have been crushing them down, and I get that. When those of us in positions of power in the establishment media and the larger cultural institutions of society tell stories that don’t include you, it is disorienting and disenfranchising. It is as if you look into society’s mirror and find that you are not there. People rightly get furious when that happens.”

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“In every crowd there are Diminishers and there are Illuminators. Diminishers make people feel small and unseen. They see other people as things to be used, not as persons to be befriended. They stereotype and ignore. They are so involved with themselves that other people are just not on their radar screen. Illuminators, on the other hand, have a persistent curiosity about other people. They have been trained or have trained themselves in the craft of understanding others. They know what to look for and how to ask the right questions at the right time. They shine the brightness of their care on people and make them feel bigger, deeper, respected, lit up.”

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“Being openhearted is a prerequisite for being a full, kind, and wise human being. But it is not enough. People need social skills. We talk about the importance of “relationships,” “community,” “friendship,” “social connection,” but these words are too abstract. 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.”

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“Some days it seems like we have intentionally built a society that gives people little guidance on how to perform the most important activities of life. As a result, a lot of us are lonely and lack deep friendships. It’s not because we don’t want these things. Above almost every other need, human beings long to have another person look into their face with loving respect and acceptance. It’s that we lack practical knowledge about how to give each other the kind of rich attention we desire. I’m not sure Western societies were ever great at teaching these skills, but over the past several decades, in particular, there’s been a loss of moral knowledge. 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. And a life spent on social media is not exactly helping people learn these skills. 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.”

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“In this age of creeping dehumanization, I’ve become obsessed with social skills: how to get better at treating people with consideration; how to get better at understanding the people right around us. I’ve come to believe that the quality of our lives and the health of our society depends, to a large degree, on how well we treat each other in the minute interactions of daily life. And all these different skills rest on one foundational skill: the ability to understand what another person is going through. There is one skill that lies at the heart of any healthy person, family, school, community organization, or society: the ability to see someone else deeply and make them feel seen—to accurately know another person, to let them feel valued, heard, and understood. That is at the heart of being a good person, the ultimate gift you can give to others and to yourself.”

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“Our social skills are currently inadequate to the pluralistic societies we are living in. In my job as a journalist, I often find myself interviewing people who tell me they feel invisible and disrespected: Black people feeling that the systemic inequities that affect their daily experiences are not understood by whites, rural people feeling they are not seen by coastal elites, people across political divides staring at each other with angry incomprehension, depressed young people feeling misunderstood by their parents and everyone else, privileged people blithely unaware of all the people around them cleaning their houses and serving their needs, husbands and wives in broken marriages who realize that the person who should know them best actually has no clue. Many of our big national problems arise from the fraying of our social fabric. If we want to begin repairing the big national ruptures, we have to learn to do the small things well.”

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“I want to see people deeply, one by one. You'd think this would be kind of easy. You open your eyes, direct your gaze, and see them. But most of us have all sorts of inborn proclivities that prevent us from perceiving others accurately.”

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“At that moment, I began to fully appreciate the power of attention. Each of us has a characteristic way of showing up in the world, a physical and mental presence that sets a tone for how people interact with us. Some people walk into a room with an expression that is warm and embracing; others walk in looking cool and closed up. Some people first encounter others with a gaze that is generous and loving; other people regard those they meet with a formal and aloof gaze. That gaze, that first sight, represents a posture toward the world. 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. “Attention,” the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist writes, “is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being.” The quality of your life depends quite a bit on the quality of attention you project out onto the world.”

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“Decades later, Buechner came to the following realization: “The trouble with steeling yourself against the harshness of reality is that the same steel that secures your life against being destroyed secures your life also against being opened up and transformed by the holy power that life itself comes from.”

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“In other words, there are two layers of reality. There is the objective reality of what happens, and there is the subjective reality of how what happened is seen, interpreted, made meaningful. That second subjective layer can sometimes be the more important layer. As the Yale psychologist Marc Brackett puts it, “Well-being depends less on objective events than on how those events are perceived, dealt with, and shared with others.” This subjective layer is what we want to focus on in our quest to know other people. The crucial question is not “What happened to this person?” or “What are the items on their résumé?” Instead, we should ask: “How does this person interpret what happened? How does this person see things? How do they construct their reality?” This is what we really want to know if we want to understand another person.”

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Book:How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
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“A person is a point of view. Every person you meet is a creative artist who takes the events of life and, over time, creates a very personal way of seeing the world. Like any artist, each person takes the experiences of a lifetime and integrates them into a complex representation of the world. That representation, the subjective consciousness that makes you you, integrates your memories, attitudes, beliefs, convictions, traumas, loves, fears, desires, and goals into your own distinct way of seeing. That representation helps you interpret all the ambiguous data your senses pickup, helps you predict what’s going to happen, helps you discern what really matters in a situation, helps you decide how to feel about any situation, helps shape what you want, who you love, what you admire, who you are, and what you should be doing at any given moment. Your mind creates a world, with beauty and ugliness, excitement, tedium, friends, and enemies, and you live within that construction. People don’t see the world with their eyes; they see it with their entire life. Cognitive scientists call this view of the human person “constructionism.” 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.”

RealityCreativityPerceptionPoint Of ViewObjectivitySubjectivityConstructionism
Book:How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
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“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.”

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