Denis Diderot Quotes

We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try.

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

Sometimes you have to get to the heart of a character through your heart. Your own heart. And it's what makes us similar and what makes us different.

Your heart, Mary Karr, he'd say. His pen touched my sternum, and it felt for all the world like the point of a dull spear as he said, Your heart knows what your head don't. Or won't.

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.

I pout my lower lip for a second, but then I grin as the pieces come together in my mind. "THAT'S why you like me!" I exclaim. "Because you're not very nice either! It makes so much more sense now.

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.

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

The mind knows only what lies near the heart.

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

But what do we know of the heart nearest to our own? What do we know of our own heart?

All writing is presumption, of course, since no one knows what it is like to be another human being.

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

I am and always have been fascinated with people, and I have a very good time coming up with the narratives of people's lives, exploring how a person thinks and feels.

One of the illusions that we live by is that we can really know anybody else, and we're often surprised by traits in people that we thought we knew very well. The struggle to overcome loneliness, which is sort of our universal burden, leads us to leap to conclusions about who other people are.

It's critical to be able to see things in other people that sometimes they don't see in themselves.

I think I am a pretty good at understanding each character of each person I meet.

If we know how to listen to our own heart, we can listen to the hearts of others.

It is only with the passions of others that we are ever really familiar, and what we come to discover about our own can only be learned from them.

I think the more we know the better we are. I mean not just facts. The more we know about each other, the closer we are to learn something about our selves.

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly.

Until we know what motivates the hearts and minds of men we can understand nothing outside ourselves, nor will we ever reach fulfillment as that greatest miracle of all, the human being.

Empathy requires knowing that you know nothing.

I observe myself and I come to know others.