T. S. Eliot Quotes

Stick to the man who looks out of the window and tries to understand the world. Keep clear of the man who looks in at the window and tries to understand you.

It was easier to know a character's point of view than it was to figure out what your point of view was.

I don't know what other people are like, I haven't been able to crawl inside anybody else.

It is something I recognise in myself. I do eavesdrop. I do people-watch, a lot.

I have definitely had experiences where I can feel the shift from simply living my life to being slightly outside of my life and taking notes.

You can't be a great comedian without having self-awareness about others or your own faults. You need a strong sense of self and view on the world. That's what great actors have, too.

Being an outsider makes you a really good writer.

When those closest to us respond to events differently than we do, when they seem to see the same scene as part of a different play, when they say things that we could not imagine saying in the same circumstances, the ground on which we stand seems to tremble and our footing is suddenly unsure.

You can't tell what a man is like or what he is thinking when you are looking at him. You must get around behind him and see what he has been looking at.

The appearance of things to the mind is the standard of every action to man.

It requires something more than personal experience to gain a philosophy or point of view from any specific event. It is the quality of our response to the event and our capacity to enter into the lives of others that help us to make their lives and experiences our own. In my own case my convictions have derived and developed from events in the lives of others as well as from my own experience. What I have seen meted out to others by authority and repression, economic and political, transcends anything I myself may have endured.

To see some truths you must stand outside and look in.

Can you step back from your own mind and thus understand all things?

I write and sing about whatever I am able to understand and feel. I feel that it is healthier to look out at the world through a window than through a mirror. Otherwise, all you see is yourself and whatever is behind you.

The writer is a person who is standing apart, like the cheese in 'The Farmer in the Dell' standing there alone but deciding to take a few notes. You’re outside, but you can see things up close through your binoculars. Your job is to present clearly your viewpoint, your line of vision. Your job is to see people as they really are, and to do this, you have to know who you are in the most compassionate possible sense. Then you can recognize others.

It is not that I am mad, it is only that my head is different from yours.

There are instances when we are like horses, we psychologists, and grow restless: we see our own shadow wavering up and down before us. A psychologist must look away from himself in order to see anything at all.

I enjoy telling these stories that I ultimately think get a disservice on a lot of network television. I enjoy getting people to change their perspective. I enjoy pushing myself into learning and understanding things from a very different point of view. It's scary to do that. It's scary to kind of put yourself in somebody else's position.

How often do we do that, he wondered--look at someone and fail to see what's really there?

To hit someone means to adopt his point of view.

We are better able to study our neighbours than ourselves, and their actions than our own.

Laughter is a sense of proportion and a power of seeing yourself from the outside.

I think fiction allows you to inhabit new domains and it's you, the reader living in that domain for a few days that results in a deeper understanding as opposed to the novel proclaiming this is what it is right and this is what is wrong.

Three quarters of the miseries and misunderstandings in the world would finish if people were to put on the shoes of their adversaries and understood their points of view

It is not events that disturb the minds of men, but the view they take of them.