Leslie Jamison Quotes

Time has its revenges, but revenge seems so often sour. Wouldn’t we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife with a husband, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that’s why men have invented God – a being capable of understanding.

Without television and mass communication, that knowledge wouldn't exist. So I think it actually has the possibility of turning people into more understanding and more empathetic people.

I've always read in order to figure out people more, and that includes bad people and good people.

A vast percentage of the human race is literally not wired neurologically to get irony. Well more than half of humanity takes life at face value, which is to me terrifying.

A lot of my career is mental, and I just have so much perspective from being raised in a city like Detroit and being able to come and live the life that I do now. To see that broad of a spectrum is really helpful for relating to people and feeling them.

Every actor demands different things. Every human being you come in contact with in your life, you have to deal with in slightly different ways.

Sometimes I feel a bit socially disconnected in terms of being a little bit gullible about how people interrelate emotionally.

Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet. Because,ultimately, the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated.

Empathy took the edge off, and the truth is, we need our edge. Our edge is trying to speak to us, and we are too, too good at shutting it up.

It is only with the passions of others that we are ever really familiar, and what we come to discover about our own can only be learned from them.

You have to learn how to care about people without taking on all of their problems.

That person is most cultivated who is able to put himself in the place of the greatest number of other persons.

My father had taught me to be nice first, because you can always be mean later, but once you've been mean to someone, they won't believe the nice anymore. So be nice, be nice, until it's time to stop being nice, then destroy them.

It is my observations, though, that happiness limits the amount of suffering one is willing to inflict upon others

The most sympathetic of men never fully comprehend woman's concrete situation.

Ninety percent of the friction of daily life is caused by tone of voice.

I understand how to read people, and nurture them and guide them, and let them be free to do what they want to do.

While it is possible for intelligence to increase the range of benevolent impulse, and thus prompt a human being to consider the needs and rights of other than those to whom he is bound by organic and physical relationship, there are definite limits in the capacity of ordinary mortals which makes it impossible for them to grant to others what they claim for themselves.

It is not to say that everything is fine and a positive attitude is all you need. But I share about values and principles and attitudes and I never tell people I understand their pain.

That's what the leadership was teaching me, day by day: that the self-interest I was supposed to be looking for extended well beyond the immediacy of issues, that beneath the small talk and sketchy biographies and received opinions, people carried with them some central explanation of themselves. Stories full of terror and wonder, studded with events that still haunted or inspired them. Sacred stories.

How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it is liking one felt, or disliking?

When you meet someone, treat them as if they were in serious trouble, and you will be right more than half the time.

Self-awareness and self-esteem. Those aren't female issues, those are human issues.

Difficult situations require compassion, level-headedness & the empathy to see issues from somebody else's perspective.

The woman's vision is deep reaching, the man's far reaching. With the man the world is his heart, with the woman the heart is her world.