Natalie Portman Quotes

For most of your career, what you're trying to do is to step into other people's shoes.

To act intelligently in human affairs is only possible if an attempt is made to understand the thoughts, motives, and apprehension of one's opponent so fully that one can see the world through their eyes.

I never had to put myself in somebody else's shoes.

I think that when you put yourself, as actors have to do, in other people's shoes, when you have to put on the costume that someone else has worn in their life, it gets much, much harder to be prejudiced against them and even to be - to not try to look at the world in a sense of "I'm not going to judge somebody. I'm going to try to understand who they are and what they're about."

People are starting to understand the other side's perspective and that's where empathy can sort of begin - once you quit judging other people but just understand where they're coming from.

Always be willing to look at both sides of the argument. Understanding the other side is the best way to strengthen your own.

Put yourself in the other man's place and then you will know why he thinks certain things and does certain deeds.

Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.

Each side has legitimate aspirations - and that's part of what makes peace so hard. And the deadlock will only be broken when each side learns to stand in the other's shoes; each side can see the world through the other's eyes. That's what we should be encouraging. That's what we should be promoting.

Because I think whenever you sit down with another human being who would absolutely disagree with you on every issue, you learn about them as a person and you relate, in human terms, and it's much more difficult for either side to dismiss out of hand, like that person's a freak, that person's a Nazi.

This whole literary game of trying to put yourself in the shoes of your opponent is good for everybody. It leaves you more open-hearted, it gives you a more accurate vision of the other person, because it's more based on curiosity than projection. In the end if you do have to fight, you're better equipped to fight. Also it doesn't leave you damaged at the end, it doesn't leave you hateful or malformed by your own anger.

Anytime you stop and talk to somebody and you learn about them, you start to walk in their shoes a little bit and you see things through a different lens.

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

What is the empathy deficit? The inability of people to stand in other folks shoes. It's hard to empathize with people who have different values than you

Three quarters of the miseries and misunderstandings in the world would finish if people were to put on the shoes of their adversaries and understood their points of view

Every word and deed must contribute to an understanding with the enemy and release those vast reservoirs of goodwill which have been blocked by impenetrable walls of hate.

Reading can almost be viewed as empathy training. Movies have better action scenes, sure. But books are uniquely suited to showing you the inside of another person's head. That is the root of empathy. That's the first step to understanding you're not alone in the world.

The most important thing that each of us can do is to try even harder to see the world through our neighbor's eyes.

We have to listen to other people's stories. That's the thing. And that's the only way that we eventually get to know ourselves.

Understanding people certainly impacts your ability to communicate with others.

Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it's very difficult to empathize across a moral divide

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.

I enjoy being an actor largely; in part at least, because you get to walk a mile in another person's shoes, you get to see what their skin is like. The other good thing is you get to leave it.

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.

To hit someone means to adopt his point of view.