Sharon Salzberg Quotes

I need my 'art work' or 'entertainment work' or whatever to have empathy for or connection to the way I experience the world as a person.

By making us stop for a moment, poetry gives us an opportunity to think about ourselves as human beings on this planet and what we mean to each other.

I'm entirely interested in people, and also other creatures and beings, but especially in people, and I tend to read them by emotional field more than anything. So I have a special interest in what they're thinking and who they are and who's hiding behind those eyes and how did he get there, and what's the story, really?

All writing is presumption, of course, since no one knows what it is like to be another human being.

I was a little bit of a loner, but fascinated with emotions that people feel.

Sometimes you have to get to the heart of a character through your heart. Your own heart. And it's what makes us similar and what makes us different.

Falling in love with someone doesn’t mean you know any better how they feel. It only means you know how you feel.

In solitude we realize that nothing human is alien to us.

George Bernard Shaw said that thinking was the greatest of all human endeavors, but I would say that feeling was. Allowing yourself to feel things, to feel love or wrath, hatred, rage.

The facts of another's life do not illumine. Only when we know the heart can we know that life. Only the feeling that made the days can light them.

We know others to the extent that we know ourselves.

Acting is about communicating what it is like to be human: the pain, the laughs, the misery, the joy. I suppose I am searching to have it all.

I have a lot of compassion for human beings in life experiences, so I allow myself to feel what these characters are feeling and don't have a problem accepting that.

People are people, and they want to know about their own experiences.

We may thank God that we can feel pain and know sadness, for these are the human sentiments that constitute our glory as well as our grief.

I like reading novels because it provides insight into human behavior. I am really interested in feelings and think they are what define us as a species. When you really get it right in acting, it's an act of empathy. You feel less distant from others, and that is really exciting.

As a writer and as a reader, I really believe in the power of narrative to allow us ways to experience life beyond our own, ways to reflect on things that have happened to us and a chance to engage with the world in ways that transcend time and gender and all sorts of things.

I think my job is hopefully to connect with people emotionally and to feel less alone or understand things in a certain way.

What differentiates us from animals is the fact that we can listen to other people's dreams, fears, joys, sorrows, desires and defeats - and they in turn can listen to ours.

But what do we know of the heart nearest to our own? What do we know of our own heart?

I'm a sensitive guy; I respond to things that make my eyes well up a little bit, or make me root for people. I find the human condition interesting.

How do you cut off the human side and just maintain being professional? So what I've done is I've incorporated that with Kojak - there's times when he allows the human condition, the human experience, to integrate into him as a professional.

If you don't understand yourself you don't understand anybody else.

Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition.