Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

Stories teach us empathy. They reveal to us ourselves in the skins of others.

Empathy is not as complicated when you have some aspects in common with your character; it's not impossible to know someone who's like you in many ways but different in one. This is true especially if you are a reader. Reading makes you accustomed to inhabiting other lives and sensibilities.

How can you expect a man who's warm to understand one who's cold?

Writing is weaponized empathy. It's putting yourself in someone else's head. It's finding what's in them that relates to you.

How can you build something for someone else if you don't have enough familiarity with them to imagine the world through their eyes?

It's hard to put yourself in someone else's head.

You can't have empathy for somebody that's gone through something you haven't - because, definitionally, you can't. But you can feel for them and have sympathy for them. And that's what this country needs to practice more. It's about realizing that you do come from a different place.

It is human nature to imagine, to put yourself in another's shoes. The past may be another country. But the only passport required is empathy.

To understand a man is really to be that man.

It requires something more than personal experience to gain a philosophy or point of view from any specific event. It is the quality of our response to the event and our capacity to enter into the lives of others that help us to make their lives and experiences our own. In my own case my convictions have derived and developed from events in the lives of others as well as from my own experience. What I have seen meted out to others by authority and repression, economic and political, transcends anything I myself may have endured.

Empathy is the most mysterious transaction that the human soul can have, and it's accessible to all of us, but we have to give ourselves the opportunity to identify, to plunge ourselves in a story where we see the world from the bottom up or through another's eyes or heart.

Imaginative empathy is one of the great gifts that humans have, and it means that we can live more than one life. We can picture what it would be like from another perspective.

I can spend 10 to 15 minutes with someone, and they can tell me what they're going through. I may never have gone through that, but I get it on a really deep level.

I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.

I think I've learnt that there is no character so strange that you haven't shared their experience in some small way.

We must put ourselves in the place of those who are to hear us

… people can't imagine someone else's point of view.

Because I'm highly empathetic, it's easy for me to put myself in the character's shoes. It's, you know, finding the truth of the moment.

There's a power in empathy.

For most of your career, what you're trying to do is to step into other people's shoes.

People treat serious subjects so seriously, which is so obvious a way of dealing with them. I'm always thinking that the best way of dealing with them is to show people as human beings.

Before I judge someone, I need to talk to them and learn what their journey's are.

Empathy begins with understanding life from another person's perspective. Nobody has an objective experience of reality. It's all through our own individual prisms.

That's what I love doing - understanding another person's perspective that's really different from mine. To me, it's like an emotional puzzle, trying to figure out the humanity of a character who is very different from myself and why they think the way they do.

A helpful thing for me has always been - this is from a great acting teacher Declan Donnellan - is this beautiful way of expressing how and why people do things that other people may not do. It's a simple sentence that says, 'I understand you; you don't understand me.'