Edward T. Hall Quotes

Whoever claims to understand another person completely, is either entirely ignorant of himself, or else has a nature so small that he can measure it easily, and supposes it to be the standard of every other nature.

People are very complex. And for a psychologist, you get fascinated by the complexity of human beings, and that is what I have lived with, you know, in my career all of my life, is the complexity of human beings.

Guess what? Human beings are complex.

I'm someone who likes to explore the complexities in people.

We may know ourselves, and yet even with all the efforts we make, we do not know ourselves. We know our fellowman, and yet we do not know him, because we are not a thing, and our fellowman is not a thing. The further we reach into the depths of our being, on someone else's being, the more the goal of knowledge eludes us.

I try as best I can to enter the realm of nuances of human behavior.

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

I like reading novels because it provides insight into human behavior. I am really interested in feelings and think they are what define us as a species. When you really get it right in acting, it's an act of empathy. You feel less distant from others, and that is really exciting.

I don't know what other people are like, I haven't been able to crawl inside anybody else.

I'm entirely interested in people, and also other creatures and beings, but especially in people, and I tend to read them by emotional field more than anything. So I have a special interest in what they're thinking and who they are and who's hiding behind those eyes and how did he get there, and what's the story, really?

If you don't understand yourself you don't understand anybody else.

The father's greatest folly is that he believes he can be a much more simple person than he is; he is not really able to deal with his own complexity as a human being.

For all their expertise at figuring out how things work, technical people are often painfully aware how much of human behavior is a mystery. People do things for unfathomable reasons. They are opaque even to themselves.

Science explained people, but could not understand them.

I've always read in order to figure out people more, and that includes bad people and good people.

I learned so much about life and other human beings - then about myself.

I understand and I don't understand human beings.

In [my] life ... I did not understand steam machinery, but I tried to understand that much more complicated piece of mechanism - man.

Read not books alone, but men, and amongst them chiefly thyself.

...the lesson of forever and ever is that knowing a man's mind ain't knowing the man.

We can only know others by ourselves.

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

All you have to do is take a close look at yourself and you will understand everyone else.

You cannot know what you do not feel.

Literally, no man ever sees himself as others see him. No photograph or reflection ever gives us the same slant on ourselves that others see. It has often been proved on the witness stand that no two people ever see the same accident precisely the same way. We see through different eyes and from different angles. But if we could see things as other people see them, we could come closer to knowing why they do what they do and why they say what they say.