Social Insight Quotes

To the extent that we have a better understanding of the brain, we will have a richer appreciation of ourselves, of our fellow men and of society and, in fact, of the whole world and its problems.

I am still very observant. I am absorbed by people and why they do what they do.

I love observing people.

Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand.

I realize then that it's not enough to know what someone is called. You have to know who they are.

Comedy is the difference between how you see a person and how they see themselves.

I love reading people. I really enjoy watching, observing, and being able to figure out a person, the reason they wore that dress, the reason they smell the way they do.

Even growing up the way I did, I was shocked by the level of poverty I saw as a college student. I thought the best way to understand it was to get close to it on the ground level.

The thing about being an outsider... is that it teaches you to hear what people are thinking because you're constantly looking for the people who just don't give a damn.

I know what people want. I know what everybody wants - I know what the streets want, I know what the suburbs want, I know what corporate people want. I know what-all type of music these people listen to.

Gossip. The more you talk about why people do things, the more ideas you have about how the world works.

A novel must show how the world truly is. Somehow, reveals the true source of our actions.

We don't get to know people when they come to us; we must go to them to find out what they are like.

I'm a voyeur. I say that with no embarrassment. If I could have a superpower, being invisible would be it, no question. I'm fascinated by human behavior; observing people and seeing how much story gets told without a lot of dialogue, and how much our brain fills in.

Once you start thinking about the lies people tell when they don't know they're telling them, the truths people reveal when they think they're lying, then you can start to build a world.

Jokes are a lot about meaning. I think if we understand what jokes mean and why they work, we'd understand everything else. Genuinely I do.

Self-knowledge comes from knowing other men.

I love studying how people are. Not just what they're saying, but how they are, what they're doing.

I am a people watcher and I have a very good memory.

Plain women know more about men than beautiful ones do. But beautiful women don't need to know about men. It's the men who have to know about beautiful women.

Backlock, a poet blind from his birth, could describe visual objects with accuracy; Professor Sanderson, who was also blind, gave excellent lectures on color, and taught others the theory of ideas which they had and he had not. In the social sphere these gifted ones are mostly women; they can watch a world which they never saw, and estimate forces of which they have only heard. We call it intuition.

The mystery in how little we know of other people is no greater than the mystery of how much, Laurel thought.

I think you can tell a lot about people if you observe them as they're observing.

There is a reason why the other man thinks and acts as he does. Ferret out that reason — and you have the key to his actions, perhaps to his personality. Try honestly to put yourself in his place.

The proverbial wisdom of the populace in the street, on the roads, and in the markets instructs the ear of him who studies man more fully than a thousand rules ostentatiously displayed.