Ruth Benedict Quotes

The self is merely the lens through which we see others and the world.

We all have mental models: the lens through which we see the world that drive our responses to everything we experience. Being aware of your mental models is key to being objective.

Look at other people and ask yourself if you are really seeing them or just your thoughts about them.... Without knowing it, we are coloring everything, putting our spin on it all.

A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing.

We must look at the lens through we see the world, as well as the world we see, and that the lens itself shapes how we interpret the world.

When your mind is simply trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.

It is an acknowledged fact that we perceive errors in the work of others more readily than in our own.

It is as hard to see one's self as to look backwards without turning around.

Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.

There is nothing respecting which a man may be so long unconscious as of the extent and strength of his prejudices.

Just look at what is right in front of you. People don't do that. They see what they expect to see, what they want to see, what conventional wisdom tells them to see. They only hear the music and not the lyrics of human events.

I assume that we are all limited by our own brains and experiences and can only understand other people and other creatures through a kind of translation that brings them closer to us.

Men are what they see and judge; though some do not fill up their light, yet none go beyond it.

Complete objectivity is not an option. We are all subjective about the way we respond to 'what is,' whether it's the people we encounter, the circumstances in our lives, or ourselves. What we can do is reduce our subjectivity - what I call 'I see, therefore it is.'

The most misleading assumptions are the ones you don't even know you're making.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

People just see what they want to see.

You cannot question an assumption you do not know you have made.

No man can see his own prejudices.

To achieve accurate knowledge of others, if such a thing were possible, we could only ever arrive at it through the slow and unsure recognition of our own initial optical inaccuracies. However, such knowledge is not possible: for, while our vision of others is being adjusted, they, who are not made of mere brute matter, are also changing; we think we have managed to see them more clearly, but they shift; and when we believe we have them fully in focus, it is merely our older images of them that we have clarified, but which are themselves already out of date.

The hardest assumption to challenge is the one you don't even know you are making.

No one seemed able to look at themselves, coolly, from the outside. Their reality was all that could be seen in the light cast ahead by their own wishful thinking.

We are so bemused by our own petard, that we are unable to look at things objectively.

It is doubtless impossible to approach any human problems with a mind free from bias.

To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything. Between what I do recognize and what I do not recognize there stands myself. And what I do not recognize I shall continue not to recognize.