Laurence Fishburne Quotes

If some people think it shows a feminine side to be in the theater, I've never felt that. And I'll openly say that an intelligent person who is a sensitive person will be and should be in touch with their inner female.

I love reading people. I really enjoy watching, observing, and being able to figure out a person, the reason they wore that dress, the reason they smell the way they do.

I drive my wife crazy. I'm hypersensitive, which she will often point out. She'll say something, and I find the way she said it hurtful. And she'll look at me like I'm an idiot and say, 'What are you talking about?' My radar is probably tuned way too sensitively. I wouldn't want to change it because I do think it's an important part of what I do.

I've made an effort to nurture the feminine in myself. I don't mean overtly, but in terms of response to things.

Woman are complex creatures.

A human being is not a machine. Especially when it comes to creating.

It makes me laugh when I hear a guy talking about being in touch with his feminine side. But I gravitate towards women; I identify with them. And I do cry very easily, more and more as I get older.

When you start to develop your powers of empathy and imagination, the whole world opens up to you.

Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason

Parenting three children at the same time has helped me grow as a filmmaker. It taught me to be more empathetic and understand what people want from me.

I think women have a unique talent for being able to see the forest and the trees at the same time.

As a young kid I assumed that everybody was sort of on the same wavelength as I was and then I found out in a lot of small ways that that wasn't the case. It's sort of a mixed blessing. My mind is like a puppy. It goes all over. I guess writing fiction was a way of harnessing that. I could hook a puppy up to a treadmill and get something out of it.

I have always been with men who were type A, alpha males. I must exist because I'm with him, I'd think. But what made them what they were also often meant they were lacking empathy genes. And now I know I don't need an alpha male; I need somebody who's interesting. I'm not pretending that I'm 100 percent healed, so I might not know if a man is right for me right away, but it wouldn't take me seven years to figure it out. Maybe a month or two.

Consult the wisdom of your heart as well as your mind.

An individual deficient in the sense of humor represents more of a challenge to our idea of the human than a person of subnormal intelligence

Imagination has to do with one's awareness of the reality of other people as well as of one's own reality. Imagination is a bridge between the provincialism of the self and the great world.

I don't have confidence in my instincts, and I feel like I have to go through a very right-brain and left-brain process.

It's rare to find a consistently creative or insightful person who is also an angry person. They can't occupy the same space, and if your anger moves in, generosity and creativity often move out. It's difficult to use revenge or animus to fuel great work.

Men tuned into women but not tuned into their own hurts usually retained the attitude that women needed special protection.

That's one of my greatest strengths. I'm a Scorpio rising - we're very decisive. I'm very good at cutting things off that don't feel right.

I do not wish you to act from these truths; no, still and always act from your feelings; only meditate often on these truths that sometime or other they may become your feelings.

When we talk about compassion we talk in terms of being kind. But compassion is not so much being kind; it is being creative [enough] to wake a person up

I don’t feel in a kind of race or competition with him or anybody else, because that kind of reactive thing isn’t good, or isn’t useful for natural creative instincts

I've always thought I had pretty good instincts for people. There is a short list of people I've worked with over my career with whom I've not been able to distinguish easily between the public persona and the real private person.

This business of really knowing people, deep down, including your own self, it is not something you can learn in school or from a book. It takes your whole being to do it—your eyes and your ears, your brain and your heart. Maybe your heart most of all. —Bobby Goodspeed