Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

You have to be completely open to what people would tell you. You do not shape them; you do not force the materials into your ideas. You have to have all windows and doors open.

One can win the attention and time and cooperation of even the most sought-after people by becoming genuinely interested in them.

I love research and being educated. It's a great job being able to step into all kinds of professions and into other people's shoes.

Flexibility, openness and softness are consorting with life. When you are rigid and you know the answer and don't listen to other people's point of view, you are consorting with death. Everything that is old and close to death is brittle and breaks apart including our thinking. So always stay flexible and soft and listen to others with caring. And truthfully, all of the verses hit me - especially when you think about them for days, and then write on them.

My favorite thing about acting is you have to learn how to work with people that you probably would never try to. Some people just aren't supposed to be in a room together, and you have to be in a room with a group of people who might not all get along and you have to figure out how to come together for one thing. That collaboration is special, and people don't get to exercise that. I think that's why people become stubborn, and I think that's why people become uninspired to change. In this job you have to.

I have always had extraordinarily good relations with very conservative colleagues. And that's not because I agree with any of them or fudge on my positions, but people feel I listen to them and give them the benefit of the doubt. I assume the best of people. And that, I think, is an attitude that is maybe rare in politics.

I think I say things nicely and my whole goal is to be understood and that includes by people who don't understand me.

I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching. No discretion that can be lodged with a school-committee, with the overseers or visitors of an academy, of a college, can at all avail to reach these difficulties and perplexities, but they solve themselves when we leave institutions and address individuals.

Unless you listen, people are weazened in your presence; they become about a third of themselves. Unless you listen, you can't know anybody. Oh, you will know facts and what is in the newspapers and all of history, perhaps, but you will not know one single person. You know, I have come to think listening is love, that's what it really is.

There was one element of my childhood that was really a positive asset for me. By moving a lot, I learned to assimilate into whatever new surroundings I had and to become very comfortable with people quickly. I think that was one of the strongest contributing factors to my becoming an actor, because I constantly had to readjust, even reinvent. But at the same time, it also became very easy for me not to become attached to people, places, or things. I learned to enjoy people and places for the time I had, for the moment, to be in the moment, and move on.

Sometimes listening itself may not be enough-some people must be prodded if you are to find out what they're thinking.

I think we waste a lot of time trying to convince other people that we're right. A lot of times we don't actually care what another person thinks, we just want to say what we think. To hear it reflected back to us and that we're okay, to hear that we have been understood and that we're correct - so that we can continue to be who we are in the ways we've been being, and we have nothing to feel bad about and everything is just fine. Even if what we're talking about is, like, police brutality.

I don't just want to talk to the choir. I want to sit down and be respectful of the people who are most unlike me, to get them to hear me and think. It doesn't mean you're going to change them right there, but just so they can hear you and what you're saying.

If you will please people, you must please them in their own way.

People who carry a musical soul about them are, I think, more receptive than others. They smile more readily. One feels in them a pleasant propensity toward the lesser sins, a pleasing readiness also to admit the possibility that on occasion they may be in the wrong--they may be mistaken.

People do what they think works for them, but the sport is about instinct, movement, balance, power... it's too animalistic to get rigid about your training.

I heard this wonderful quote - "Only the brave show what they love." It's so-embarrassing to approach somebody and say you want to look at them. But without that risk taking, nothing can happen, so I have to make myself vulnerable. What I think is the unifying aspect in people that I like is that they have a sense of their own vulnerability, and I respond to that.

I'm open to whatever. I think sometimes when people collaborate these days, it's a little bit convenient.

There is no single approach that actors take to their craft. And the best thing you learn is that you have to really listen and respect each actor's own process and own method, and that takes a kind of delicate, non-imposing patience and openness, I think, to get the very best out of the people you work with.

I don't want people walking out of a movie thinking I was trying to act or be some movie star. I want them to think, 'That might make me like Jessica a little bit more.'

Empathetic people are superb at recognizing and meeting the needs of clients, customers, or subordinates. They seem approachable, wanting to hear what people have to say. They listen carefully, picking up on what people are truly concerned about, and respond on the mark.

I think the lesson that I learnt very early on was to listen to people you work with, because you're all in it together.

A willingness to drop your ego and let yourself look foolish. You almost have to enjoy looking vulnerable. You'd be surprised how many people don't want to do that.

Everyone in show business makes these sweeping, "I'll never work with so-and-so again," because that's the way you feel at the moment. It's a business where there really is no point in ever saying never. There are people I've sworn that I would never go near again, and then you see an interesting role that would put you opposite that person and you think, "Well, we'll work together, maybe they were having a bad year."

Somebody's got to tell all the people to be like the water