Theodore Zeldin Quotes

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.

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.

The kind of conversation I like is one in which you are prepared to emerge a slightly different person.

When will we make the same breakthroughs in the way we treat each other as we have made in technology?

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.

A dream is what makes people love life even when it is painful.

Only when people learn to converse will they begin to be equal.

All invention and progress comes from finding a link between two ideas that have never met.

What we make of people, and what we see in the mirror when we look at ourselves, depends on what we know of the world, what we believe to be possible, what memories we have, and whether our loyalties are to the past, the present or the future.

Art is, nowadays, our new religion and museums are our cathedrals.

The past is what provides us with the building blocks. Our job today is to create new buildings out of them.

I think the hero in our generation is not the individual but the pair, two people who together add up to more than they are apart.

Change the way you think, and you are halfway to changing the world.

Two individuals, conversing honestly, can be inspired by the feeling that they are engaged in a joint enterprise, aiming at inventing an art which has not been tried before.

We should strive to be employed in such a way that we don't realize that what we're doing is work.

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.

One of the great ambitions is to discover the diversity of the world, to discover who inhabits the world.

The great thing about marriage is that it creates trust, the most precious of things.

Forks and spoons have probably done more to reconcile people who cannot agree than guns and bombs ever did

Everything I am going to say to you is the child of a conversation. [...] That is the aspect of conversation that particularly excites me: how conversation changes the way you see the world, and even changes the world.

Nothing influences our ability to cope with the difficulties of our existence so much as the context in which we view them; the more contexts we can choose between, the less do the difficulties appear to be inevitable and insurmountable.

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.

The violent have been victorious for most of history because they kindled the fear with which everyone is born.

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.

To be a catalyst is the ambition most appropriate for those who see the world as being in constant change, and who, without thinking that they can control it, wish to influence its direction.