Love
The good life is one inspired by love
and guided by knowledge.
(Bertrand Russell)
If I want to see you, I want to see, at least a little bit, how you see the world. I want to see how you construct your reality, how you make meaning. I want to step, at least a bit, out of my point of view and into your point of view.
David Brooks • How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
Ickes finds that the longer many couples are married, the less accurate they are at reading each other. They lock in some early version of who their spouse is, and over the years, as the other person changes, that version stays fixed—and they know less and less about what’s actually going on in the other’s heart and mind.
David Brooks • How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
we are simply incapable of imagining ourselves on the other side of a profound change, because the present self doing the imagining is the very self that needs to have died in order for the future self being imagined to emerge.
This is why the profoundest changes tend to happen not willed but spawned by fertile despair — the surrender at the rock bo
... See moreThe Germans (of course) have a word for it: herzensbildung, training one’s heart to see the full humanity in another.
David Brooks • How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
"You are going to spend 1000x more time in your surrounding 5 blocks than you will in any other neighborhood in your city. Thinking about all the things that New York City has—or the next city has—is a lot less important than thinking about the things within the five blocks where you live.
M... See more
Self-knowledge is obviously a process, not an end in itself; and to know oneself, one must be aware of oneself in action, which is relationship. You discover yourself, not in isolation, not in withdrawal, but in relationship—in relationship to society, to your wife, your husband, your brother, to man; but to discover how you react, what your respon
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