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

even in cases where we’re devoted to a person, and know a lot about them, it’s still possible to not see them. You can be loved by a person yet not be known by them.

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.

He had come to realize that excavation is not a solitary activity. It’s by sharing our griefs with others, and thinking together about what they mean, that we learn to overcome fear and know each other at the deepest level. “What we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we a

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.

“but that piece of time is not only your own life, it is the summing-up of all the other lives that are simultaneous with yours….What you are is an expression of History.”

George Bernard Shaw got it right: “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”

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.

when I’m in a conversation with someone now, I’m trying to push against that and get us into narrative mode. I’m no longer content to ask, “What do you think about X?” Instead, I ask, “How did you come to believe X?” This is a framing that invites people to tell a story about what events led them to think the way they do. Similarly, I don’t ask peo

Anger would be a declaration that she has a self that is separate from the social context. She doesn’t yet possess that separate independent self. So instead of feeling angry when she is affronted, she feels sad or wounded or incomplete. Part of the problem is that her conception of self is not sturdy enough to stand up to people.