Quotessence
Home / Books / How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

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

Book by David Brooks · 4 quotes · Understanding, Empathy, Relationships

Filter quotes by topic

AllUnderstandingEmpathyRelationshipsWisdomConnectionHumanityLifeMoralityCompassionConversationsEmotionsLivingPerceptionRealitySocial SkillsCommunityFriendshipGroupsSubjectivityTrust

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.”

HumanityEvilSeeingMoralityPerceptionImmoralityPersonhoodSeeing People
Book:How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
Create image

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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
Create image