How to Know a Person

Depression makes it hard to imagine a time when things will ever be better.

The quality of your relationships determines the quality of your life.

It’s enough to create an atmosphere in which they can share their experience. It’s enough to offer them the comfort of being seen.

Human beings need recognition as much as they need food and water.

Life goes a lot better if you can see things from other people’s points of view, as well as your own.

To really know someone, you have to know how they know you.

Successful friendship, like successful therapy, is a balance of deference and defiance.

Wisdom is practiced when people come together to form what Parker Palmer called a 'community of truth.

Receptivity without confrontation leads to a bland neutrality that serves nobody.

Being open-hearted is a prerequisite for being a full, kind, and wise human being.

The number one reason people don’t see others is that they are too self-centered to try.

Attention is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being.

If you consider that each person has a soul, you will be aware that each person has some transcendent spark inside them.

Morality is mostly about how you pay attention to others.

Love is knowledge of the individual.

Experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you.

We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.

With every comment you are either making me feel a little more safe or a little more threatened.

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

People are longing to be asked questions about who they are.