Tim Robbins Quotes

But some actors I have met possess an intelligence that I can only dream of. It's about character, it's about behavior. They understand things about people that I simply don't see.

It takes a little bit of mindfulness and a little bit of attention to others to be a good listener, which helps cultivate emotional nurturing and engagement.

The myth of writer as, like, Asperger-style misanthrope, or, like, the Jack Nicholson, 'As Good As It Gets' - it just doesn't work, because writers, in order to write good characters, need to understand people. You need to understand your audience. You need to have so much empathy you could almost encourage empathy in others.

It's important to determine not just the quality of your mind but the fullness of your heart.

Being a good actor is sort of understanding the complexity of the human psyche and also knowing that we are none of us perfect.

You can't understand a character intellectually, you have to become one with its emotional core.

Good characters don't believe they're bad. As long as you as an actor believe in them and try to understand them, it's not hard to have empathy and sympathy.

It helps to be more interested in other people than you are in yourself. Inhabiting other characters is what I do.

It's one of the ironies of human nature that the most sensitive people are generally insensitive to the feelings of others.

Even before I did stand-up, I've always been the kind of guy - and I talk about it on stage - who says I like people and I always look for the good in people. I say, 'Every person has something good about them, if you can just find it.'

There are three kinds of intelligence: one kind understands things for itself, the other appreciates what others can understand, the third understands neither for itself nor through others. This first kind is excellent, the second good, and the third kind useless.

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.

Good acting comes from finding the essence of a character.

We lack social awareness because we're so focused on what we're going to say next - and how what other people are saying affects us - that we completely lose sight of other people. This is a problem because people are complicated. You can't hope to understand someone until you focus all of your attention in his or her direction.

Empathy and social skills are social intelligence, the interpersonal part of emotional intelligence. That's why they look alike.

Good actors, you always know what they're thinking. That's why they're good actors.

The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.

Man becomes man only by his intelligence, but he is man only by his heart.

Whatever you think about his intelligence, what's unquestionable is that Reagan had extraordinary emotional intelligence. He could sense the temperature of a room, and tell them a story and make them feel good. And that's more fun, right? It's more fun to feel good than feel bad. That's part of our human state.

'Know thyself' is a good saying, but not in all situations. In many it is better to say 'know others.'

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.

Emotional intelligence is your ability to recognize and understand emotions in yourself and others, and your ability to use this awareness to manage your behavior and relationships.

I think that people who are famous tend to be underdeveloped in their humanity skills.

As an actor, if you decide that someone is bad... you can't play bad, because even the worst person doesn't think what they're doing is bad.

To act, no matter how the character is, you have to love and have compassion for the character you're playing.