Jonathan Lethem Quotes

When you're not involved, other people's unhappiness seems to be about the funniest damn thing on earth because you think you can solve it, that you are God, that you are above this, and that their unhappiness is just such useless toil and agony. If it's you, it ceases to be a comedy.

I'm not generally a sensitive person, but I tend to be more sensitive toward others and what they're going through. I don't know if that's the healthiest thing, but it's the truth.

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.

I think one of my best qualities is my ability to empathize with people. Perhaps it's because my journey has been so bumpy.

Good acting should teach people to understand rather than judge.

The next time someone is critical of you, just take a moment to consider their life. Then smile to yourself.

Speak not against anyone whose burden you have not weighed yourself.

You are right,” he had said. “Love is not the word. No one can love his neighbor. Say, rather, ‘Know thy neighbor as thyself.” That is, comprehend his hardships and understand his position, deal with his faults as gently as with your own. Do not judge him where you do not judge yourself. Madame, this is the meaning of the word love.

As a performer, I'm constantly fascinated with the idea of being able to know what anybody else's experience is, and how misleading all informatives, like appearance, can be.

The ability to understand the cause of your own suffering gives you the ability to understand ours.

[T]he unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion and fear, which blind us to the fact that they are really, despite a thousand differences, just altered versions of ourselves: fellow fragile, uncertain, flawed beings likewise craving love and in urgent need of forgiveness.

A fool sees himself as another, but a wise man sees others as himself.

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 think the therapeutic part of acting is allowing myself to step into another human being's shoes. It allows me the ability to release judgment, if I had any judgment to begin with. It's an opportunity to understand rather than to stand outside and point fingers.

I try to speak from a place of understanding and most times I'm speaking from a place of experience.

I respect anybody that is very in tune with their feelings.

I'm incredibly tenacious, but I also try so hard in my work to really listen to people and address their point of view. In the end, I always remember who I'm an advocate for.

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

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.

When you see yourself as the center of things, it deprives you of a certain level of empathy.

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.

I am a very sensitive person.

I'm a very sensitive person.

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.