Mitski Quotes

Traveling through the world produces a marvelous clarity in the judgment of men. We are all of us confined and enclosed within ourselves, and see no farther than the end of our nose. This great world is a mirror where we must see ourselves in order to know ourselves. There are so many different tempers, so many different points of view, judgments, opinions, laws and customs to teach us to judge wisely on our own, and to teach our judgment to recognize its imperfection and natural weakness.

You can learn a lot when you're around people that are completely different than yourself.

'Narnia' has opened my eyes to a lot of things. I feel lucky that I'm able to travel; I'm not stuck in my hometown, meeting the same kind of girls and saying hi to the same people, week after week. There are so many interesting, intelligent girls out there.

I've been in Africa, America, moving around a lot. It's helped me to open up my mind. I was born in Jamaica; I've lived all my life there and got all I could from Jamaica. But I needed to be somewhere else to grow.

You should be a person inside the world with knowledge of your terrain. And if you lock yourself into the 2,000-by-3,000-square-mile, lower-48 box of the United States, you're going to be frustrated by its limitations. You gotta think outside the box.

It is always good to explore the stuff you don't agree with, to try and understand a different lifestyle or foreign worldview. I like to be challenged in that way, and always end up learning something I didn't know.

Let me put it this way: when I read, I learned the world was not as small as my house. And that everybody in my home town was not representative of the way people in the world were raised. And that was what saved me.

One of the great things that you should never do that I learned from John Malkovich is to never judge your characters.

Anywhere you go in the world is what you make of it, not what you read in books.

If I meet other people and criticize their weaknesses, I rob myself of higher cognitive power. But if I try to enter deeply and lovingly into another person's good qualities, I gather in that force.

I always learn a lot when I do so. You know, when you step out of your comfort zone and even your cynical zone, and open yourself up to what other people might experience and why they do so.

That's always what I've tried to do. I've tried to communicate. But at the end of the day, it's still for you to understand something. Understand that the world is bigger than you.

I'm interested in listening to the people who walk in the door. If your ego and your accomplishments stop you from listening, then they've taught you nothing.

I like meeting people from other walks of life and finding out about other worlds, and knowing that I'm fairly adept at one world and really stupid in many others.

You go to Africa, and you see how things are over there. Spiritually, it opens you up.

At some point you have to take responsibility for who you are and where you are and being able to listen to other points of view, whichever side of the tracks you're on.

We're so immersed in ourselves at home, but when you're travelling, it's important to be open.

Am I caught in a self-centred, narrow little cell which refuses to look beyond? Do I see it when you come along and tell me that my brain is the brain of all mankind?

if a man would make his world large, he must be always making himself small.

I've always wanted to get as far as possible from the place where I was born. Far both geographically and spiritually. To leave it behind ... I feel that life is very short and the world is there to see and one should know as much about it as possible. One belongs to the whole world, not just one part of it.

I'm not trying to sound like I turned into some kind of wise man, but it's nice to realize that your little pocket of the world isn't the whole world.

Adventurous reading allows one to escape a little from the provincialities of one's home culture and the blinders of one's narrow self.

I'm challenging everybody on every side of every divide to be more who they are, to cultivate their capacity for awareness.

The best education I have ever received was through travel.

Go and experience life the way that someone else might experience it. Maybe you'll find meaning in a different corner of your brain. The fact that it changed doesn't negate the fact that it ever mattered.