Eugene H. Peterson Quotes

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

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

I'm curious about people. That's what I've always done since I've been a small boy. I'm curious about others.

I believe that if you can discover something of the truth of a person, then you will start to understand, and to understand is to move towards, if not like, then at least an empathy of some kind.

I don't expect people to get me. That would be quite arrogant. I think there are a lot of people out there in the world that nobody gets.

It's the differences in people that help you realize who you are. Even if we silently pass each other on the street.

You can listen to 'Cosmic' and truly get to know me, which I think is special.

Over the years, I just started paying a lot more attention not to whether I was right or wrong, but just to how I make people feel.

Getting to know people as they are is very, very important.

Be aware that you can truly help people only by aiding them to become what they are, not what you are. I have heard you say 'If I were you, I would do this, or that.' 'I' am never 'you'--and my solutions may not be yours.

It's in understanding yourself deeply that you can lend yourself to another person's circumstances and another person's experience.

Remember that every man is a variation of yourself

Everyone has their own personality, its own character, and if he respects that, everything would finally fall over for good only.

One of the biggest lessons I've learned during my time on 'Oprah' is that everyone wants to be heard. We all want to have our humanity acknowledged - to have others see us for who we truly are. We all want to know that we are valued, we are heard, we are understood.

Progress and healing involves seeing every person as not so different from ourselves.

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.

I think what makes us human - is our interconnectedness among people. It's our ability to form and maintain relationships. It's the barometer by which we call ourselves human.

As we look around, it's very clear that in this world people do outrageous things to one another all of the time. It's not that these qualities or actions make us bad people, but they bring tremendous suffering if we don't know how to work with them.

I could be less impatient with people. I sometimes judge by impressions.

I want, by understanding myself, to understand others. I want to be all that I am capable of becoming.

All we will ever know and share about love, humility, compassion, and sacrifice - the secrets that will reveal and then resolve old sorrows - awaits us within ourselves.

I fall in love with contradictions without understanding. I can't really portray them unless I do. So in a roundabout way I have to fall in love, it's my duty. If love is about understanding and understanding is compassion and compassion is love, I have to have compassion towards the world.

How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these.

I love, I love human beings, studying them.

When you research someone, you actually get beyond your own preconceptions and become aware of the human being other than the image. You become empathetic and sympathetic in turn.