Erving Goffman Quotes

After my performance 'The Artist is Present (2010)' at MoMA in New York, many scientists became interested in why so many people who sat across from me began to cry. I was incredibly moved by this experience also, and was very curious to know what happens in our brains when we spend time not talking, just looking at one another.

You've probably noticed how when someone says hello or smiles at you, your automatic reaction is to say hello or smile back.

We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.

Writing is, by its nature, interior work. So being forced to be around people is a great gift for a novelist. You get to be reminded, daily, of how people think, how they speak, how they live; the things they worry about, the things they hope for, the things they fear.

A bland smile is like a green light at an intersection, it feels good when you get one, but you forget it the moment you're past it.

Everyone is influencing the people around them one way or another.

Yes, people do come across the street to say hi, but as they approach and get near, my perception of space begins to dissolve, and a new interest takes over that is primarily emotional, and with it comes a desire to touch, which may be a human interest, but not the interest of my work.

All those chemicals that create empathy only work when you are in a room together.

The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society.

I was immediately smitten with an attraction to this culture, not in the sense of high culture but of the basic way people behaved towards one another.

It is difficult to imagine how any behavior in the presence of another person can avoid being a communication of one's own view of the nature of one's relationship with that person and how it can fail to influence that person.

The web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect—to help people work together—and not as a technical toy. The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our weblike existence in the world. We clump into families, associations, and companies. We develop trust across the miles and distrust around the corner.

Showing 'Get Out' to a room full of strangers and having them react lets them be introspective and see the way certain images affect other people.

Brains affect brains through far more means than words and listening.

I love how humans talk.

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.

The one thing that robots really find difficult to do is to look someone in the eye and have a sense of how they're feeling. We should be teaching that in schools.

Even the most introverted person alive is constantly hungry for human association

To get anything done, you used to have to brush past, or at least lay eyes on, someone whose reality was totally different from your own. That used to be inevitable. If that goes away because everything's so convenient, everything's brought to you, well, then there goes one of my favorite parts of life, and something that I've gone out of my way to court.

A man is sane only to the extent that he subscribes to a previously-agreed construction of reality.

Sweet intercourse of looks and smiles; for smiles from reason flow.

There is not, in fact, any such thing as the direct influence of one human being on another apart from use of the physical environment as an intermediary. A smile, a frown, a rebuke, a word of warning or encouragement, all involve some physical change. Otherwise, the attitude of one would not get over to alter the attitude of another.

I am very much a people person. If I am in a beautiful place but I don't like the people, I am miserable.

She missed the built environment of New York City. It was only in an urban landscape, amid straight lines and architecture, that she could situate herself in human time and history. She missed people. She missed human intrigue, drama and power struggles. She needed her own species, not to talk to, necessarily, but just to be among, as a bystander in a crowd or an anonymous witness.

You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Paty, which is collective and immortal.