Edward T. Hall Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

We can measure with a tape whether or not a man can reach something, but we must apply an entirely different set of standards to judge the validity of an individual's feeling of being cramped.

Edward T. Hall
Time talks. It speaks more plainly than words. The message it conveys comes through loud and clear. Because it is manipulated less consciously, it is subject to less distortion than the spoken language. It can shout the truth where words lie.

Edward T. Hall
Perhaps the most devastating and damaging thing that can happen to someone is to fail to fulfill his potential. A kind of gnawing emptiness, longing, frustration, and displaced anger overwhelms people when this occurs.

Edward T. Hall
Insights are easy to come by, but they can be deceptive. We tend to think we have done something when we have had an insight. But insights not acted on are a bit of a fraud.

Edward T. Hall
One of the most effective ways to learn about oneself is by taking seriously the cultures of others. It forces you to pay attention to those details of life which differentiate them from you.

Edward T. Hall
The best reason for exposing oneself to foreign ways is to generate a sense of vitality and awareness — an interest in life which can come only when one lives through the shock of contrast and difference.

Edward T. Hall
The fact that behavior in animals is predominantly sex-linked has led to certain misconceptions concerning the role of sex in man.

Edward T. Hall
A keystone in the arch of human understanding is the recognition that man at certain critical points synthesizes experience.

Edward T. Hall
The essence of cross-cultural communication has more to do with releasing responses than with sending messages. It is more important to release the right response than to send the right message.

Edward T. Hall
Space perception is not only a matter of what can be perceived but what can be screened out. People brought up in different cultures learn as children, without ever knowing that they have done so, to screen out one type of information while paying close attention to another. Once set, these perceptual patterns apparently remain quite stable throughout life.

Edward T. Hall
Our own culture tends to stress that which can be controlled and to deny that which cannot.

Edward T. Hall
Man senses distance as other animals do. His perception of space is dynamic because it is related to action — what can be done in a given space — rather than what is seen by passive viewing.

Edward T. Hall
When Western people train the mind, the focus is generally on the left hemisphere of the cortex, which is the portion of the brainthat is concerned with words and numbers. We enhance the logical, bounded, linear functions of the mind. In the East, exercises of this sort are for the purpose of getting in tune with the unconscious--to get rid of boundaries, not to create them.

Edward T. Hall