Hannah Arendt Quotes

Common experience is the gold reserve which confers an exchange value on the currency which words are; without this reserve of shared experiences, all our pronouncements are checks drawn on insufficient funds.

I like to talk to people and, obviously, to photograph them.

Each person's life is lived as a series of conversations.

My passion in life isn't politics. It truly is connecting to people and women.

I'm really interested in how we understand each other - and whether we can understand each other.

With so many ways to communicate at our disposal, we must not forget the transformative power of a live music experience and genuine human exchange.

Society not only continues to exist by transmission, by communication, but it may fairly be said to exist in transmission, in communication.

Gossiping has become the main form of communication in human society. It has become the way we feel close to each other, because it makes us feel better to see someone else feel as badly as we do. There is an old expression that says, 'Misery likes company,' and people who are suffering in hell don't want to be all alone.

No pleasure is fully delightful without communications, and no delight absolute except imparted.

You do have all five sense when you're in a room together. You communicate and understand each other in a much deeper way. It is a different form of communication from writing or being on the web.

The basic agreement between human beings, indeed what makes them human and makes them social, is language.

Perhaps it is indeed time I began to look at this whole matter of bantering more enthusiastically. After all, when one thinks about it, it is not such a foolish thing to indulge in - particularly if it is the case that in bantering lies the key to human warmth.

Human communication, 'as the saying goes, is a clash of symbols' it covers a multitude of signs. But it is more than media and messages, information and persuasion; it also meets a deeper need and serves a higher purpose. Whether clear or garbled, tumultuous or silent, deliberate or fatally inadvertent, communication is the ground of meeting and the foundation of community. It is, in short, the essential human connection.

The most important thing in all human relationships is conversation, but people don’t talk anymore, they don’t sit down to talk and listen. They go to the theater, the cinema, watch television, listen to the radio, read books, but they almost never talk. If we want to change the world, we have to go back to a time when warriors would gather around a fire and tell stories.

Understanding one another means that objects, including sounds, have the same value for both with respect to carrying on a common pursuit.

An ancient father says that a dog we know is better company than a man whose language we do not understand.

In general, American social life constitutes an evasion of talking to people. Most Americans don't, in any vital sense, get together; they only do things together.

It is not in vain that man speaks to man. This is the value of literature.

If we’re going to solve the problems of the world, we have to learn how to talk to one another. Poetry is the language at its essence. It’s the bones and the skeleton of the language. It teaches you, if nothing else, how to choose your words.

In my opinion, the most fruitful and natural play of the mind is conversation. I find it sweeter than any other action in life; and if I were forced to choose, I think I would rather lose my sight than my hearing and voice. The study of books is a drowsy and feeble exercise which does not warm you up.

I have spent many years trying to recover a common language, one that can cross the distance between people.

Is there some lesson on how to be friends? I think what it means is that central to living a life that is good is a life that's forgiving. We're creatures of contact regardless of whether we kiss or we wound. Still, we must come together. Though it may spell destruction, we still ask for more-- since it beats staying dry but so lonely on shore. So we make ourselves open while knowing full well it's essentially saying "please, come pierce my shell.

The real crucial link in the international exchange is the last three feet, which is bridged by personal contact, one person talking to another.

That's why I've never thought of retiring because I do it all the time whether on the stage or off. I found that in a precarious situation, a smile is the shortest distance between people. When one needs to reach out for sympathy or a link with people, what better way is there?

I envy people who have the capacity to sit with another human being and find them endlessly interesting, I would rather watch TV. Of course this becomes eventually known to the other person.