David Baldacci Quotes

Our culture is all about shallow relationships. But that doesn't mean we should stop looking each other in the eye and having deep conversations.

Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves. We need them to tell us. We need them to say, "I know you, Al. You are not the kind of man who.

Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another? We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person's essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?

You know about a person who deeply interests you more than you can be told. A look, a gesture, an act, which to everybody else is insignificant tells you more about that one than words can.

Money is not a substitute for tenderness, and power is not a substitute for tenderness.

You must remember to love people and use things, rather than to love things and use people.

There is no hope of joy except in human relations.

The problem isn't to learn to love humanity, but to learn to love those members of it who happen to be at hand.

Because everything of value that we will know in this life comes from our relationships with those around us. Because there is nothing material that measures against the intangibles of love and friendship.

There’s nothing to it. All you have to do is take a close look at yourself and you will understand everyone else. We’re in no way different ourselves... You show me someone who can’t understand people and I’ll show you someone who has built up a false image of himself.

If men could only know each other, they would neither idolize nor hate.

People like to say that Plutarch's is a really "personal" voice, but in truth Plutarch tells us very little about his life. His voice is personable but never personal. It feels intimate because he's addressing the world as we experience it, at this level, a human level, rather than way up here where very few of us live.

Physical intimacy isn’t and can never be an effective substitute for emotional intimacy.

If more people recognized the difference between friendship and mere attraction, or how love must partake of both to prosper, I expect there'd be more happy people." "And a lot fewer poems and plays," I said, laughing as I splashed about in the scented water.

The thing always is to go to where people really are and what they're really feeling about life.

There are a few things that can be done only by experiencing them. Love is one of them. There is no way to learn it; you have to do it. And by trial and error one learns.

We were awash in tiny attentions. Small gestures, words, empathies thought to be extinct came to life... We discovered the color of each other's eyes.

Love with its paraphernalia of sexuality, jealousy, nostalgia and exaltation was easier to reognize than friendship, which seemed to have (excepting athletic equipment) no paraphernalia at all.

Just as I need other human beings in order to learn from them, so I also need their trust. If we aren't aware of that, if we fail to take it to heart and instead betray other people's trust, things will go badly with us.

I try to find something that applies not to me only, but to others, but don't try to control it too much. Essentially it is about what moves us, teaches us about ourselves.

And he who does not know himself does not know others, so it may be said with equal truth, that he who does not know others knows himself but very imperfectly.

The loveliest face in all the world will not please you if you see it suddenly eye to eye, at a distance of half an inch from your own.

I often learn more about myself from listening to the life story of a friend than I do reflecting on my own story.

This business of really knowing people, deep down, including your own self, it is not something you can learn in school or from a book. It takes your whole being to do it—your eyes and your ears, your brain and your heart. Maybe your heart most of all. —Bobby Goodspeed

Love affairs are the real only education in life.