It is never possible to understand completely any other human being; and no individual will ever really understand himself - the complexity is too great and there is not the time to constantly take things apart and examine them.

Man is used to the fact that there are languages which he does not at first understand and which must be learned, but because art is primarily visual he expects that he should get the message immediately and is apt to be affronted if he doesn't.

People are tied together and yet isolated from each other by invisible threads of rhythm and hidden walls of time. Time is... a primary organizer of all activities, a synthesizer and integrator, a way of handling priorities and categorizing experience, a feedback mechanism for how things are going, a measuring rod against which competence, effort, and achievement are judged as well as a special message system revealing how people really feel about each other and whether or not they can get along.

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.

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.

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.

... while infants will sync with the human voice regardless of language, they later become habituated to the rhythms of their own language and culture ... ... humans are tied to each other by hierarchies of rhythms that are culture-specific and expressed through language and body movement.