Anton Chekhov Quotes

I'm cursed with empathy. I'm also by nature way too opinionated.

I think what is British about me is my feelings and awareness of others and their situations. English people are always known to be well mannered and cold but we are not cold - we don't interfere in your situation. If we are heartbroken, we don't scream in your face with tears - we go home and cry on our own.

It is, for example, axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more sensitive than other people because, when we are insensitive in our dealings with others, we cannot be aware of it at the time: conscious insensitivity is a self-contradiction.

Listening is terribly important if you want to understand anything about people. You listen to what they say and how they say it, what they share and what they are reticent about, what they tell truthfully and what they lie about, what they hope for and what they fear, what they are proud of, what they are ashamed of. If you don't pay attention to other people, how can you understand their choices through time and how their stories come out?

I'm sensitive to how people are feeling if they feel like they got it wrong, and sensitive to the people who are kind of gloating that they knew all along, they figured it out. I'm loving them through this process, because I know that it took me a while once I found out that it was me.

Writing about people helps us to understand them, and understanding them helps us to accept them as part of ourselves.

I have pitfalls. I have emotional responses to things that are really not about me. They're about other people.

One way to overcome our natural self-centeredness is to try to see things from other people's perspectives.

One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own.

People in my inner circle of loved ones - we're tight and I've never misjudged someone as far as I know; I can feel someone's intentions, I know their intentions before they probably are honest enough with themselves to know it, so that's my strength.

I'm quite a good reader of people; I like to meet people, and I can tell if they're lying or not.

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

The degree to which one is sensitive to other people's suffering, to other (people's) humanity, is the index of one's own humanity

I'm not a person that's easily embarrassed, but I'm embarrassed for other people.

In many things it is not well to say, "Know thyself"; it is better to say, "Know others."

The secret of man's success resides in his insight into the moods of people, and his tact in dealing with them.

The answer to a lot of your life's questions is often in someone else's face. People's faces will tell you amazing things. Like if they are angry, or nauseous, or asleepTry to keep your mind open to possibilities and your mouth closed on matters that you don't know about. Limit your 'always' and your 'nevers.' Continue to share your heart with people even if it has been broken.

When someone does not know how to handle his own suffering, one allows it to spill all over the people around him or her. When you suffer, you make people around you suffer. That's very natural. This is why we have to learn how to handle our suffering, so we won't spread it everywhere.

There is something I call social intelligence. You can do a lot in life on your own and you can do all kinds of stuff, but if you're really bad with people, if you're really naive or aggressive and push people away, if you don't know the political environment you're in, it invalidates all the things you know. You're not going to get anywhere.

Millions of people are suffering: they want to be loved but they don't know how to love. And love cannot exist as a monologue; it is a dialogue, a very harmonious dialogue.

I can understand other people's situations in their own terms, but I still can't understand mine.

I write about my life and the lives of people around me and situations, and the idea's for each record to try to make you a better person, to understand the life that you lead more.

When you stop putting yourself on the line, and you don't touch your own heart, how do you expect to touch other people?

The difficult task of knowing another soul is not for young gentlemen whose consciousness is chiefly made up of their own wishes.