Ian Mcewan Quotes

I put a lot of emphasis on how to treat people. The reason for this is simple. The real success of our personal lives and careers can best be measured by the relationships we have with the people most dear to us - our family, friends, and coworkers. If we fail in this aspect of our lives, no matter how vast our worldly possessions or how high on the corporate ladder we climb, we will have achieved very little.

The man who can put himself in the place of other men, who can understand the workings of their minds, need never worry about what the future has in store for him.

When we watch stories, we learn empathy, we learn compassion, and hopefully we achieve some sort of understanding.

Change begins with understanding and understanding begins by identifying oneself with another person: in a word, empathy. The arts enable us to put ourselves in the minds, eyes, ears and hearts of other human beings.

It's got to do with putting yourself in other people's shoes and seeing how far you can come to truly understand them. I like the empathy that comes from acting.

To keep the Golden Rule we must put ourselves in other people's places, but to do that consists in and depends upon picturing ourselves in their places.

It's never that hard for me to imagine what it must feel like to be someone else, whether it's an American teenage girl or a Japanese octogenarian man.

I will never actually be able to know what it's like to go through life in someone else's body.

I think, at the end of the day, acting and activism are both about empathy. You're trying to get people to see other people as real and human. And to care.

We think empathy is innate, but it's not. It's a muscle you're working.

Empathy begins with understanding life from another person's perspective. Nobody has an objective experience of reality. It's all through our own individual prisms.

A helpful thing for me has always been - this is from a great acting teacher Declan Donnellan - is this beautiful way of expressing how and why people do things that other people may not do. It's a simple sentence that says, 'I understand you; you don't understand me.'

A love of reading shows empathy, the desire to understand how others live or act or might act - and why.

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

I think it's easy to mistake understanding for empathy - we want empathy so badly. Maybe learning to make that distinction is part of growing up. It's hard and ugly to know somebody can understand you without even liking you.

We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try.

Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdains; under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core.

If you can identify with people, you can empathize with people and therefore you understand things.

The trick, though, is to not lose compassion, to not allow the sense of absurdity to outweigh the awareness of real beings, with real feelings. Mean-spirited humor turns the world into cardboard, the way Midas's simple-minded greed turned food into inedible and useless stuff.

The ability to understand people is a choice.

Persons are not known by intellect alone, not by principles alone, but only by love. It is when we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who he is, and who we are. It is only this realization that can open to us the real nature of our duty, and of right action.

Here's what I would want for humanity, because this is what I have come to see is true: it's so simple when we listen to people.

In our ordinary experiences with other people, we know that approaching each other in a machinelike way gets us into trouble.

I don't defend the idea of universal love. It has never existed and will never exist.

As human beings, we aren't as individual as we'd like to believe we are. And I think that's what makes acting possible. Despite the fact that I have not experienced something, I have it in my human capacity to imagine it and to put myself in someone else's shoes, and to take someone else's circumstances personally.