Edward T. Hall Quotes & Sayings

Culture hides more than it reveals, and strangely enough what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants. — Edward T. Hall

Now, you can't tell me, we have the only God in the whole world. You can't tell me that nobody else has God. — Edward T. Hall

For him to have understood me would have meant reorganizing his thinking ... giving up his intellectual ballast, and few people are willing to risk such a radical move. — 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. Whether the anger is turned inward on the self, or outward towards others, dreadful destruction results. — Edward T. Hall

Each culture has its own characteristic manner of locomotion, sitting, standing, reclining, and gesturing. — Edward T. Hall

How man evolved with such an incredible reservoir of talent and such fantastic diversity isn't completely understood ... he knows so little and has nothing to measure himself against. — Edward T. Hall

Two points that are very important points to remember and ask: Is it real and does it work? — Edward T. Hall

From now on, how one arrives at a definition of the relationship of man's basic nature to his culturally conditioned control systems (extensions) is of crucial importance. For in our shrinking globe man can ill afford cultural illiteracy. — Edward T. Hall

The study of man is the study of his extensions. — Edward T. Hall

It is characteristic of all extension systems to be treated as distinct and separate from the user and to take on an identity of their own. Religions, philosophies, literature, and art illustrate this. After a time, the extended system accretes to itself a past and a history as well as a body of knowledge and skills that can be learned. Such systems can be studied and appreciated as entities in themselves. — Edward T. Hall

Culture is not made up but something that evolves which is human. — Edward T. Hall

The reason man does not experience his true cultural self is that until he experiences another self as valid he has little basis for validating his own self. — 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

Age affects how people experience time. — Edward T. Hall

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. — 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

We live fragmented, compartmentalized lives in which contradictions are carefully sealed off from each other. We have been taught to think linearly rather than comprehensively, and we do this not through conscious design or because we are not intelligent or capable, but because of the way in which deep cultural undercurrents structure life in subtle but highly consistent ways that are not consciously formulated. — Edward T. Hall

The exciting thing about mathematics and science and music and literature is what they can tell us about the workings of the human mind. For these disciplines are literally models (extensions) of at least certain parts of the mind. Just as the knife cuts but does not chew, while the lens does only a portion of what the eye can do, extensions are reductionist in their capability. No matter how hard it tries, the human race can never fully replace what was left out of extensions in the first place. Also, it is just as important to know what is left out of a given extension system as it is to know what the system will do. Yet the extension-omissions side is frequently overlooked. — Edward T. Hall

We should never denigrate any other culture but rather help people to understand the relationship between their own culture and the dominant culture. When you understand another culture or language, it does not mean that you have to lose your own culture. — Edward T. Hall

By their very nature bureaucracies have no conscience, no memory, and no mind. — Edward T. Hall

The future for us is the foreseeable future. The South Asian, however, feels that it is perfectly realistic to think of a 'long time' in terms of thousands of years. — Edward T. Hall

Behind every piece of paper lies a human situation. — Edward T. Hall

I may be able to spot arrowheads on the desert but a refrigerator is a jungle in which I am easily lost. — Edward T. Hall

People carry around with them internalization's fixed-feature space learned early in life. Man is like other members of the animal kingdom , first, last and always a prisoner of his biological organism. No matter how hard he tries, it is impossible for him to the best himself of his own culture, where it has penetrated to the roots of his nervous system and determines how he perceives the world. — Edward T. Hall

Viewing movies in very slow motion, looking for synchrony, one realizes that what we know as dance is really a slowed-down, stylized version of what human beings do whenever they interact. — 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

We are only peripherally tied to the lives of others. It takes a long long time for us to become deeply involved with others, and for some this never happens. — Edward T. Hall

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 ... — Edward T. Hall

I have found the study of organisms to be a truly exciting experience, always interesting and sometimes humbling. — Edward T. Hall

Because we have put ourselves in our own zoo, we find it difficult to break out. — Edward T. Hall

The information is in the people, not in your head. — 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

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. — Edward T. Hall

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. — Edward T. Hall