Fred Rogers Quotes

I think more than anything, people just want to be understood.

For me, storytelling is all about how we learn about each other. I'm so curious about people, what makes them tick, why they are who they are, and how we all relate to each other, despite the fact that we may not think that we do.

I've never been interested in things that sparkle and shine; I'm more interested in people.

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

If I hadn't read all of Jane Austen and DH Lawrence, Tolstoy and Proust, as well as the more fun stuff, I wouldn't know how to break bad news, how to sympathise, how to be a friend or a lover, because I wouldn't have any idea what was going on in anybody else's mind.

I'm usually pretty good about meeting people. I try to remember they are human, too!

I'm just incredibly interested in people.

I like people. I like to speak to people, engage with people.

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

I am truly passionate and concerned about the lack of empathy that people show towards one another.

Unless you listen, people are weazened in your presence; they become about a third of themselves. Unless you listen, you can't know anybody. Oh, you will know facts and what is in the newspapers and all of history, perhaps, but you will not know one single person. You know, I have come to think listening is love, that's what it really is.

The more deeply you understand other people, the more you will appreciate them, the more reverent you will feel about them. To touch the soul of another human being is to walk on holy ground.

The older I get, the more convinced I am that the space between people who are trying their best to understand each other is hallowed ground.

I'm still aspiring to be a better and better person, but I think that disappointments have made me gentler with other people and their disappointments, the stuff that they have to carry around and endure.

Some people think that without that spark of empathy we would do nothing, but that's just flat-out wrong. You could feel compassion for somebody without the spark of empathy.

If you can identify with people, you can empathize with people and therefore you understand things.

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

Three-fourths of the people you will ever meet are hungering and thirsting for sympathy. Give it to them, and they will love you.

One learns peoples through the heart, not the eyes or the intellect.

Understanding people certainly impacts your ability to communicate with others.

I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.

My whole work drive has been aimed at making people understand each other. . .

Dialogue cannot exist, however, in the absence of a profound love for the world and its people.

Empathy takes time, and efficiency is for things, not people.

Here's what I would want for humanity, because this is what I have come to see is true: it's so simple when we listen to people.