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

Book by David Brooks · 5 quotes · Understanding, Empathy, Relationships

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

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