Joy Bryant Quotes

This is what I tell my students: step outside of your tiny little world. Step inside of the tiny little world of somebody else. And then do it again and do it again and do it again. And suddenly, all these tiny little worlds, they come together in this complex web. And they build a big, complex world.

I think that personal experience is very important, but certainly it shouldn't be a kind of shut-box and mirror-looking, narcissistic experience. I believe it should be relevant, and relevant to the larger things, the bigger things, such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on.

We can't afford to live in isolation, and we need to teach our kids that the things that they do not only matter to others far away but impact others who live far away, and there are ripples of effect.

We cannot close ourselves off to information and ignore the fact that millions of people are out there suffering. I honestly want to help. I don't believe I feel differently from other people. I think we all want justice and equality, a chance for a life with meaning. All of us would like to believe that if we were in a bad situation someone would help us.

Christians don't seem to be as aware of, or as sensitive to, the dire state of humanity as they are about the pleasant growth of their Christian walk.

You, I, we all encounter behaviors that we might say, I wouldn't do that. But she has a huge amount of contact with how people live. She sees more hospices and sink estates than most people.

When you truly accept that those children in some far off place in the global village have the same value as you in God's eyes or even in just your eyes, then your life is forever changed; you see something that you can't un-see.

There cannot be enduring peace, prosperity, equality and brotherhood in this world if our aims are so separate and divergent, if we do not accept that in the end we are people, all alike, sharing the Earth among ourselves and also with other sentient beings, all of whom have an equal role and stake in the state of this planet and its players.

I think my kids are pretty well-rounded citizens of the world.

War is idiocy. We live on a small, small planet, and what we do to others is what we do to ourselves.

Be curious enough to keep an open mind to what's happening around you in society. You can look at yourself and the world at the same time.

I don't think anyone, no matter what, can find perfect happiness until they understand exactly who they are and how every little thing they do can affect the world around them. I think perfect happiness would be a world where everyone is constantly striving to understand everyone else.

I think it's important to look at the world as a bigger place than just the bubble that we live in. It's so easy to get caught up in things of a trivial nature.

We recognize and accept our own deep involvement in the destiny of men everywhere.

I'm always thinking about the bigger picture and always feeling so much for everybody else, and kind of experiencing the pain of the world, personally.

If you don't open your eyes to other people's lives, you can't even begin to understand how the world works at all.

My problems are so miniscule compared to what's going on in the world. In that sense, I feel liberated.

I don't need a set of message board points to tell me that people are hurting in my state. I know it because I've lived it.

Beggars remind us that not all miseries arise from our ideas.

When people start talking of man's inhumanity to man it means they haven't actually walked far enough.

Bob Geldof feels the big picture all the time, even in the smallest argument when someone's saying, 'Well, no, you've got to have three staples in the program, not just two,' Bob feels people dying somewhere.

The friends I have, and the people whom I admire, are people who have an understanding of the conditions under which we live, and have a humanist sense of the world. If that's lacking in my understanding of a person's negotiation of the world, I can't be close with that person.

I believe that it is only through empathy, that the pain experienced by an Algerian woman, a North Korean dissident, a Rwandan child or an Iraqi prisoner, becomes real to me and not just passing news. And it is at times like this when I ask myself, am I prepared - like Huck Finn - to give up Sunday school heaven for the kind of hell that Huck chose?

I absolutely believe the species, the planet and the Universe can't survive if we function on hate.

When our hearts open, when we know that we are in fact the world, when we experience the pain of others in our own blood and muscle, we are feeling compassion.