Theodore Zeldin
Each person is an enigma. You're a puzzle not only to yourself but also to everyone else, and the great mystery of our time is how we penetrate this puzzle.Collection: Time
We think of speaking as something we do naturally, without any effort. But like playing music, it requires attention and knowledge and practice.Collection: Knowledge
I'm constantly astounded by the way people talk so openly to someone they don't know. They clarify in their own minds what is important to them, discover another person has similar problems, and create trust and even a friendship.Collection: Friendship
When two people talk with mutual respect and listen with a real interest in understanding another point of view, when they try to put themselves in the place of another, to get inside their skin, they change the world, even if it is only by a minute amount, because they are establishing equality between two human beings.Collection: Respect
The more education you do, the less you are capable of doing.Collection: Education
The main purpose of engaging in conversation can no longer be personal advancement or respectability. Instead, I'd like for us to use conversations to create equality, to open ourselves to strangers, and, most practically, to remake our working world.Collection: Equality
People in this world of superficial communication find themselves isolated and lonely and have difficult in talking about personal things that really matter to them.Collection: Communication
A dream is what makes people love life even when it is painful.
Change the way you think, and you are already halfway to changing the world.
However fascinating you may think you are, there is a limit to what you can know about yourself.
Gastronomy has done more to bring together people of the world than any guns ever could.
Judaism is not a dogmatic religion but one which loves debate, in which scholarship has played a big part. Scholars never agree about anything.
One of the great ambitions is to discover the diversity of the world, to discover who inhabits the world.
You have to accept that traditions exist, that people don't change their minds very quickly, that people are scared.
The French have made conversation their claim to civilisation.
Families have become models for public life, constructing friendships between individuals of different temperaments, ambitions and ages, even if they are often unsuccessful. People now want, above all, appreciation of their uniqueness.
People are going to be living quite soon for 100 years. Our idea of how a family works no longer applies. It's no good saying you're going to have children for 15 years and then you're going to retire and have hobbies, because you've got 40 more years to go after 60 and you're in good health until 90 or something.
The institution of marriage, if you look at it over many centuries, has come and gone.
The great thing about marriage is that it creates trust, the most precious of things.
To idolise a person means you don't get to know them, and the idea that you can become one is a myth, and it also means that you don't need to talk to one another because you're the same person.
We imagine that human nature doesn't change. We like to say that but I don't think it's true because we have, in the course of the centuries, altered ourselves.
Never before have humans been so ambitious, have they thought that they could be much more than their parents were.
The English reputation for humour is a way by which people avoid revealing themselves and have superficial relationships, so that you can engage in banter without making yourself vulnerable.
The British have turned their sense of humour into a national virtue. It is odd, because through much of history, humour has been considered cheap, and laughter something for the lower orders. But British aristocrats didn't care a damn about what people thought of them, so they made humour acceptable.
I don't think there is anything a man can do that a woman cannot do.
Breaking accepted rules does bring people together.
We should abolish 'work.' By that I mean abolishing the distinction between work and leisure, one of the greatest mistakes of the last century, one that enables employers to keep workers in lousy jobs by granting them some leisure time.
We are already seeing the creation of a new kind of network based on friendships: Startups, which are often founded by friends, are the beginning of something that could reshape social relations.
Conversation creates a new kind of network within organizations. Current networks are used for competitive advantage, but conversation is focused on encouraging people to realize their potential.
We should strive to be employed in such a way that we don't realize that what we're doing is work.
What does it mean to dance? What does it mean to commit a crime? What does it mean to be anxious? What does it mean to tell a joke? The great thing about the French is that they have thought about these subjects in a great variety of ways and are a very articulate people.
The tendency of experts is to fiddle around with their expertise rather than trying to find new solutions.
The world is... often terrifying, disgusting and tragic, but it is also beautiful. I should like to know how exactly each person would make it a tiny bit less disgusting and a tiny bit more beautiful.
In every life there is an element of victory over fear, which needs to be searched for, though it may be a false victory.
It is in the power of everybody, with a little courage, to hold out a hand to someone different, to listen, to attempt to increase, by even a tiny amount, the quantity of kindness and humanity in the world.
I'm amazed at the number of young women who tell me they can't find men to talk to them.
I think it's impossible to predict the future but it is possible to look at the past and see how one can do differently from what one's ancestors have done and learn from their mistakes, and one can see how even though there are enormous forces which stop one doing what one wants to, there are little holes in which the individual can do something.
I think one of the most important changes of our time has been our attitude to fear. Every civilisation defends itself by keeping fears out and saying 'we protect you from fear'. But it also produces new fears and throughout history people have changed the kind of fears which have worried them.
I don't think fear can be abolished.
We cannot change public life until we have changed private life.
What's missing from the world is a sense of direction.
It's easy to say, 'I'm anti-capitalist,' or, 'I'm anti-Western decadence,' without having to be challenged about what that actually means, or how you might go about reshaping society to make it better.
So much of what passes for conversation today is degraded. It's either about one-upmanship, or dreary trivia. Even the cut and thrust of wit and bons mots is a form of bedazzlement designed to stop conversations dead rather than broaden them.
You cannot measure the minute nuance that makes the difference between being happy and unhappy at work.
France is an idea, not a territory. They pay more attention to intellectuals here; they give artists and writers the feeling they're valued.
Conversation is a meeting of minds with different memories and habits. When minds meet, they don't just exchange facts: they transform them, reshape them, draw different implications from them, engage in new trains of thought. Conversation doesn't just reshuffle the cards: it creates new cards.Collection: Memories
The brain is full of lonely ideas, begging you to make some sense of them, to recognize them as interesting. The lazy brain just files them away in old pigeonholes, like a bureaucrat who wants an easy life. The lively brain picks and chooses and creates new works of art out of ideas.Collection: Lonely
The kind of conversation I like is one in which you are prepared to emerge a slightly different person.Collection: Different
When will we make the same breakthroughs in the way we treat each other as we have made in technology?Collection: Learning
Only when people learn to converse will they begin to be equal.Collection: People