Quotes from the book "How to know a Person" - David Brooks

This book is more like knowing yourself better even if you are NOT able to get better at knowing others. Good read definitely.

A servant knows more about his master than the master knows about the servant.

Respect is like air. When it's present nobody notices, but when it's absent it's all anybody can think about.

A great conversation is between two people who think the other is wrong. A bad conversation is between those who think something is wrong with you.

How you see a situation depends on what you are capable of doing in a situation.

I am human, and nothing human is alien to me.

A person who is perpetually angry is always mishearing and misreading others.

First empathy skill is recognizing emotions/mirroring. The second empathy skill is not just mirroring but menatlizing. The third empahty skill is caring.

You can be knowledgeable with other men's knowledge, but you can't be wise with other men's wisdom.

Grief is not a state but a process. Its a river that runs through a long valley, and at every turn a new landscape is revealed.

The more you know of your history, the more liberated you are.

If you want to understand another person, you have to be able to descibe the particular energy they bring into a room.

Often it's the people who score lower on agreeableness who get appointed to CEO jobs and make the big bucks.

Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they are finished.

As the saying goes, they are not going to solve their problem at the same leve of consciousness at which they created it.

I am no longer content to ask, "What do you think about X?" Instead, I ask, "How did you come to believe X?"

"Tell me about the person who shaped your values most". That prompts a story.

All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story.

A man is always a teller of stories. He lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them;and tries to live his life as if he were recounting them.

On average, people have an experience of inner speech about 23% of the time.

Four types of inner voices: The Faithful Friend( who tells you about your personal strengths), the Ambivalent Parent (who offers caring criticism), the Proud Rival (who badgers you to be more successful), and the Helpless Child (who has a lot of self-pity).

The only way you can describe a human being is by describing his imperfections.

In a classic 1972 study, students from USA and Taiwan were given groups of three things and asking which two of the three go together. When shown pictures of a man, woman and child. The american kids tended to put the man and woman together, because they are both adults. The Taiwanese kids tended to put the woman and child together because the mother takes care of the baby. 

When shown pictures of chicken, a cow, and grass the american kids put the chiken and cow together because they are both animals. The Taiwanese kids put the cow and grass together because a cow eats grass. In these and many other cases the americans tended to sort by categories and the Taiwanese tended to sort by relationships.

Happy Reading !!!