Vivek Murthy Quotes

Unless you can be in a place yourself and go through the subject of your story yourself, the next best thing is not to read a book about it, or see a movie about it, it's to talk to the people who've been there.

One thing I learned about people is that they love to give their opinions about things.

No one lives long enough to learn everything they need to learn starting from scratch. To be successful, we absolutely, positively have to find people who have already paid the price to learn the things that we need to learn to achieve our goals.

Everybody is an expert on one thing - that's what I learned in my high school journalism class - and that's, of course, his own life. And everybody deserves to live and have his story told. And if it doesn't seem like an interesting story, then that's the failure of the listener, or the journalist who retells it badly.

I always had a lot of confidence in my ability to gauge a situation and people and try to understand them and what they were saying and what their context was.

I think the best research is people you meet and things that they say, rather than second hand accounts of something. I think when you meet someone and talk to them, then you get the real thing and that's what you can use. That's the material you can actually put on the page.

It's always a consistent approach of trying to get better, listening and learning from everybody else, and then that will help you become a better leader.

I love talking to strangers and absorb their life experiences.

It wasn’t in books. It wasn’t in a church. What I needed to know was out there in the world.

If you let someone talk for an hour, you're gonna have a pretty good idea of who they are, and I think that's more rewarding than me sitting there going, "That's complete bullshit about health care."

Most people acquire most of their knowledge outside school, and in school only insofar as school, in a few rich countries, has become their place of confinement during an increasing part of their lives.

The best research you can do is to talk to people.

In my opinion, being an effective leader requires being an effective listener. The most productive leaders are usually those who are consistently willing to listen and learn.

It is a true proverb, that if you live with a lame man, you will learn to limp.

We can teach a good, formal lesson on forgiveness as a Christian virtue and all the doctrines that are attached to it. But to be in a real-life situation, a work camp or a trip or some other activity with young people where real forgiveness needs to happen, that's a different situation altogether. And that is where the deepest learning will occur.

I have trouble listening to people tell me about their dreams.

I've just found the stories of the people I'm talking to much more interesting than my reactions to them.

In order always to learn something from others (which is the finest school there can be), I observe in my travels this practice: I always steer those with whom I talk back to the things they know best.

I begin with humility, I act with humility, I end with humility. Humility leads to clarity. Humility leads to an open mind and a forgiving heart. With an open mind and a forgiving heart, I see every person as superior to me in some way; with every person as my teacher, I grow in wisdom. As I grow in wisdom, humility becomes ever more my guide. I begin with humility, I act with humility, I end with humility.

Ultimately success or failure in photographing people depends on the photographer's ability to understand his fellow man.

The secret of man's success resides in his insight into the moods of people, and his tact in dealing with them.

After having read a lot of fiction, literature, whatever you want to call it, from Wolfe to Houellebecq, I think you have to have an understanding and insight of the human condition that is informed and motivated by a desire to immerse yourself in the human world and bring these stories to bear.

By looking at squinting people you learn to squint.

I learn everything I play by listening to somebody else.

Where are these rational practices to be taught and acquired? Not within the four walls of a bare building, in which formality predominates... But in the nursery, play-ground, fields, gardens, workshops, manufactures, museums and class-rooms. ...The facts collected from all these sources will be concentrated, explained, discussed, made obvious to all, and shown in their direct application to practice in all the business of life.