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David Brooks Quotes

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Famous David Brooks 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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Book:How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
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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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Book:How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
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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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“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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Book:How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
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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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Book:How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
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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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Book:How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
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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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Book:How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
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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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Book:How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
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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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Book:How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
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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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Book:How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
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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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Book:How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
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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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Book:How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
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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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“Stairway to Wisdom”) David Brooks detailed the needed ingredients to gaining a deep understanding of a social problem, beginning with the data and moving on to first-hand accounts. The highest rung on his stairway, though, went beyond those: “Empathy opens you up to absorb the good and the bad. Love impels you not just to observe but to seek union—to think as another thinks and feel as another feels.”

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Author:David Brooks
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“Big Brother is not the only danger facing the country. Another is the rising tide of distrust, the corrosive spread of cynicism, the fraying of the social fabric and the rise of people who are so individualistic in their outlook that they have no real understanding of how to knit others together and look after the common good.”

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Author:David Brooks
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