Nadine Gordimer Quotes

By recognizing your own vulnerability you can recognize and identify with the vulnerability in others.

Most of your suffering comes from the lack of understanding of yourself and others.

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

What a powerful thing to know: That one's own desires are mappable onto strangers; that what one finds in oneself will most certainly be found in The Other.

The more I've learned about me, the more I'm interested in others.

I wanted to live the inner life of every man I saw, look at the world through his eyes.

The beginning of self-knowledge: recognizing that your motives are the same as other people's.

I'm curious about other people. That's the essence of my acting. I'm interested in what it would be like to be you.

Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.

To understand another human being you must gain some insight into the conditions which made him what he is.

We're so complex; we're mysteries to ourselves; we're difficult to each other. And then storytelling reminds us we're all the same.

Stories teach us empathy. They reveal to us ourselves in the skins of others.

How can you build something for someone else if you don't have enough familiarity with them to imagine the world through their eyes?

It's hard to put yourself in someone else's head.

It is human nature to imagine, to put yourself in another's shoes. The past may be another country. But the only passport required is empathy.

I am not bothered by the fact that I am not understood. I am bothered when I do not know others.

You can make your life so much larger simply be acknowledging everyone else's.

Compassion takes imagination.

You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself.

They say: 'If a man knew himself, he would know all mankind.' I say: 'If a man loved mankind, he would know something of himself.

No one can deal with the hearts of men unless he has the sympathy which is given by love.

Clem (Clementa Pinckney) understood that justice grows out of recognition of ourselves, in each other.

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.

A fool sees himself as another, but a wise man sees others as himself.

I don't ask for your pity, but just your understanding - no, not even that -no. Just for your recognition of me in you, and the enemy, time, in us all.