Harlan Coben Quotes

Part of being a sentient human is the ability to anticipate others' mental states - to say "Fred's going to hate this but Jane would love it."

Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what the other man or woman is doing.

We spend our lives guessing at what's going on inside everybody else, and when we happen to get lucky and guess right, we think we 'understand.' Such nonsense. Even a monkey at a computer will type a word now and then.

The first meaning of 'cognitive' for us is that observations of others are made phenomenologically: i.e., by attempting to take the role of the other, to see things from his or her conscious viewpoint.

Nobody knows what another person is thinking. They may imagine they do, but they are nearly always wrong.

My job is all about getting inside another person's mind and thoughts.

You can't tell what a man is like or what he is thinking when you are looking at him. You must get around behind him and see what he has been looking at.

Reading will put you into the minds and hearts of others. It might help you understand why other people do what they do sometimes.

In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them.... I destroy them.

One must understand what people are thinking, feeling and believing in order to enchant them.

Many doctors are drawn to this profession (psychology) because they have an innate deficiency of insight into the motives, feelings and thoughts of others, a deficiency they hope to remedy by ingesting masses of data.

If I think about what other people are thinking when I'm making music, I just can't do it. It's too withheld - I need to go totally over the top, and then kind of clean it up a bit and make it more reasonable after the fact.

Most people, no matter what they do, they don't think they're a bad person. The place where their actions are coming from is a complicated place and a whole personal history. I definitely think that it helped me to look at the world a little less judgmentally.

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

If I'm talking to you, I can't see you, but I can see inside of you and what you're thinking. That's a mixed blessing.

I think human beings are funny, tricky things.

It's kind of funny that I've been branded as the empathy lady when, really, what I'm doing is questioning and interrogating empathy.

It may be true in the case of autism that if you start off with a deficit in terms of empathy or mind reading, you've just got more time to devote to understanding the world by systemizing.

I think to perfectly understand somebody is to predict their next move.

My knowledge of myself is direct, synthetic, from within outwards; my knowledge of other persons is indirect, analytical, from outside inwards. My knowledge of myself starts at the core; that of others at the crust.

It's very hard to predict what people are thinking.

I think that if we don't learn to inhabit other people's perspectives, then we're never going to understand why people do what they do.

We can only know others by ourselves.

To think justly, we must understand what others mean. To know the value of our thoughts, we must try their effect on other minds.

Put yourself in the other man's place and then you will know why he thinks certain things and does certain deeds.