Seth Godin Quotes

For most of your career, what you're trying to do is to step into other people's shoes.

It is only through literature that one can put oneself in someone else’s shoes and understand the other’s different and contradictory sides and refrain from becoming too ruthless. Outside the sphere of literature only one aspect of individuals is revealed. But if you understand their different dimensions you cannot easily murder them.

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.

I can't not put myself in the shoes of every person I pass.

I never had to put myself in somebody else's shoes.

I don't think I can see the world through other people's eyes, but I can capture an attitude or a look that makes others think I can. I have an appreciation for why people choose to look the way they do. But I can't know what they experience.

Empathy is the main thing, putting yourself in somebody else's shoes and trying not to judge.

We're terrible at realising what goes on in other people's heads because we are trapped inside our own.

Anytime you stop and talk to somebody and you learn about them, you start to walk in their shoes a little bit and you see things through a different lens.

Success in dealing with people depends on sympathetic grasp of the other person's viewpoint.

What is the empathy deficit? The inability of people to stand in other folks shoes. It's hard to empathize with people who have different values than you

The biggest deficit that we have in our society and in the world right now is an empathy deficit. We are in great need of people being able to stand in somebody else's shoes and see the world through their eyes.

We have to listen to other people's stories. That's the thing. And that's the only way that we eventually get to know ourselves.

He who knows himself properly can very soon learn to know all other men. It is all reflection.

Understanding people certainly impacts your ability to communicate with others.

I wouldn't claim to know what another person is thinking. I can imagine it, but it's my interpretation, and I try to make that clear. It's my vision of what I think their life is. I don't think there are empirical truths in that regard.

This whole literary game of trying to put yourself in the shoes of your opponent is good for everybody. It leaves you more open-hearted, it gives you a more accurate vision of the other person, because it's more based on curiosity than projection. In the end if you do have to fight, you're better equipped to fight. Also it doesn't leave you damaged at the end, it doesn't leave you hateful or malformed by your own anger.

I was thinking one of the great things about fiction is we, as a race, only get to look out of our own eyes at the world. And fiction is a fantastic way of looking out through somebody else's eyes.

I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.

I enjoy being an actor largely; in part at least, because you get to walk a mile in another person's shoes, you get to see what their skin is like. The other good thing is you get to leave it.

We often get caught up in our own reactions and forget the vulnerability of the person in front of us.

Most of your suffering comes from the lack of understanding of yourself and others.

When your feet start to hurt, place yourself in someone else's shoes.

All we do is to look after the opinions and learning of others: we ought to make them our own.

It is never possible to understand completely any other human being; and no individual will ever really understand himself - the complexity is too great and there is not the time to constantly take things apart and examine them.