Rob Bell Quotes

Humanity has this need to hear stories because they connect us with other people, they teach us about our own feelings. We feel less lonely when we see other people going through the same things, even if they're fictional characters.

… people never become a mass, they remain entities, and so you are able to feel human suffering and make others feel it because it is represented to you by individuals

I don't need to have my convictions confirmed by a show of numbers. However, being among people in front of a band leads me to believe that all is not lost, that humans, now and then, can communicate on a higher level than the political and the practical.

Empathy has the power to bring together people who would otherwise never meet. It has the power to teach us and to reach us in moments of isolation when we think nobody understands.

I think that human beings are often looking for a reason to relate.

The value of emotions comes from sharing them, not just having them.

I think conveying the emotion of the collective "we" is pretty incredible. Especially in tumultuous times like we are in now.

People who laugh together generally don't kill each other.

To connect to people at the deepest level, you need stories.

I think that's what we all want on this earth - to feel that at some level we have connected with other human beings.

If you're a person and care about other people - I don't think I have any sort of special understanding or anything, I think any feeling person would experience similar things if given the same opportunities to see the things I've been lucky enough to see and meet the people I've been lucky enough to meet.

The job of reading is to use stories as a way into seeing other people as we see ourselves

People are never too young or too old to look for human connection.

Stories turn anonymous strangers into people who matter.

Then I tell my own story. The two things that people really need to transform is language to understand their experience and to know they're not alone. It's the combination of the researcher-storyteller part.

There’s a very deep connection among human beings. All we have to do is open our minds to it.

We think that because we dwell inside our bodies that we are separate from other people who dwell inside theirs.

At times I feel myself overtaken by an immense tenderness for these people around me who live in the same century.

When a novelist manages to describe or evoke something you thought or felt, without realizing that other people also found themselves in the same situation and had the same feelings, it creates that same solidarity. Maybe it's better to think of humor not as a tool to express the solidarity, but a kind of by-product. Maybe the realization "I'm not on my own on this one" is always, or often, funny.

We all are born with a certain package. We are who we are: where we were born, who we were born as, how we were raised. We're kind of stuck inside that person, and the purpose of civilization and growth is to be able to reach out and empathize a little bit with other people. And for me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy. It lets you understand a little bit more about different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us.

We need other human beings in order to be human.

...[I am] utterly entranced, at times, with the mere fact that there are other people, and that they experience themselves as the primary center of consciousness just as I do. That fact alone...Well, that fact alone is staggering.

The purpose of civilization and growth is to be able to reach out and empathize with other people... For me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy.

Human beings want to see each other. We want to be heard by each other.