David Berman Quotes

The same way that you are the main character of your story, you are only a secondary character in everybody else's story.

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

… people can't imagine someone else's point of view.

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

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.

The greatest tragedy for any human being is going through their entire lives believing the only perspective that matters is their own.

I am a songwriter and producer, and though you have to be personal in everything you do, you always having to look at things from another's perspective.

People seen by the mind are exactly different to things seen by the eye. They grow smaller and smaller as you come nearer down to them, whereas things become bigger.

It is always easy to question the judgement of others in matters of which we may be imperfectly informed.

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.

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

Only a very small percentage can regard conditions from any but a selfish point of view or conceive of any but their own shoe-pinch.

Empathy requires something extremely difficult: accepting the fact that we are not and never will be in the other person's shoes. There's no rational, universal course because individuals have different goals, different worldviews and different experiences.

We are not sure we are right until we have made the best case possible for those who are wrong.

Without images we can neither think nor understand anything.

I was thinking one of the great things about fiction is we, as a race, only get to look out of our own eyes at the world. And fiction is a fantastic way of looking out through somebody else's eyes.

My dad would always say, "When you look at a photo do you see yourself last?"

Imagination is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

Listening to others, especially those with whom we disagree, tests our own ideas and beliefs. It forces us to recognize, with humility, that we don't have a monopoly on the truth.

The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event ... For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities.

When your feet start to hurt, place yourself in someone else's shoes.

To hit someone means to adopt his point of view.

Most human beings who are accustomed to attempting to see the world from various points of view tend to be more liberal than conservative.

What's fascinating about acting is that you put yourself in somebody else's mind or in their shoes.

We have very similar brains. But they come out in different personalities.