Anyhow, I've learned one thing now. You only really get to know people when you've had a jolly good row with them. Then and then only can you judge their true characters!

I've learned one thing: you only really get to know a person after a fight. Only then can you judge their true character!

I've learned one thing: you can only really get to know a person after a row. Only then can you judge their true character!

You only really get to know a person after a fight. Only then can you judge their true characters!

Ajungi să cunoști bine oamenii abia după ce te-ai certat cu ei o dată. Abia atunci poți să le judeci caracterul!

I don’t think you know anyone fully until you know them in relationship to something else or someone else.

It is very difficult to know people and I don't think one can ever really know any but one's own countrymen. For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they are born, the city apartment or the farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives' tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. It is all these things that have made them what they are, and these are the things that you can't come to know by hearsay, you can only know them if you have lived them.

You can't really get to know a person until you get in their shoes and walk around in them.

Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?
We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person's essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?

People decide what you're like before they even get to know you” (p193)

It’s very important you learn people as people are. Anybody can go around and write a book about a person, but that book doesn’t always tell you that person really. At that particular moment when you are talkin’ to that person, maybe that’s how that person were. Tomorrow they can be different people.

You want to avoid at all costs drawing your characters on those that already exist in other works of fiction. You must learn about people from people, not from what you read. Your reading should confirm what you’ve observed in the world.

When does one ever know a human being? Perhaps only after one has realized the impossibility of knowledge and renounced the desire for it and finally ceased to feel even the need of it. But then what one achieves is no longer knowledge, it is simply a kind of co-existence; and this too is one of the guises of love.

Every person that you meet knows something you don't; learn from them.