Translation error is compounded by bias error. We distort others by forcing into them our preferred ideas and gestalts, a process Proust beautifully describes: We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds, these ideas have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him which we recognize and to which we listen. Irvin D. Yalom
Some Similar Quotes
  1. I'm oxygen and he's dying to breathe. - Tahereh Mafi

  2. I'm a little pencil in the hand of a writing God, who is sending a love letter to the world. - Mother Teresa

  3. Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come. - Matt Groening

  4. Happiness is the china shop love is the bull. - H.l. Mencken

  5. People say that eyes are windows to the soul. - Khaled Hosseini

More Quotes By Irvin D. Yalom
  1. Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you'll always find despair.

  2. It is wrong to bear children out of need, wrong to use a child to alleviate loneliness, wrong to provide purpose in life by reproducing another copy of oneself. It is wrong also to seek immortality by spewing one's germ into the future as though...

  3. The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.

  4. Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.

  5. The freedom of an unscheduled afternoon brought confusion rather than joy. Julius had always been focused. When he was not seeing patients, other important projects and activities-writing, teaching, tennis, research-clamored for his attention. But today nothing seemed important. <span style="margin:15px; display:block"></span>He suspected that nothing had...

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