Patrick Rothfuss Quotes

Reading will put you into the minds and hearts of others. It might help you understand why other people do what they do sometimes.

When we watch stories, we learn empathy, we learn compassion, and hopefully we achieve some sort of understanding.

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.

It's got to do with putting yourself in other people's shoes and seeing how far you can come to truly understand them. I like the empathy that comes from acting.

We think empathy is innate, but it's not. It's a muscle you're working.

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

A love of reading shows empathy, the desire to understand how others live or act or might act - and why.

I was fifteen years old when I understood how it is that things break down: people can't imagine someone else's point of view.

Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.

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.

Great books help you understand, and they help you feel understood.

Fiction challenges us and works its miracles by placing us in the skin of another human being and teaching us empathy.

Each of us really understands in others only those feelings he is capable of producing himself.

Empathy is the most mysterious transaction that the human soul can have, and it's accessible to all of us, but we have to give ourselves the opportunity to identify, to plunge ourselves in a story where we see the world from the bottom up or through another's eyes or heart.

I really like feeling connected to people and feeling like I have a good, solid sense of empathy.

All I want is for people, when they read my books, to feel companioned, to feel they're not alone in the world.

Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.

To love a person is to know and love the person. But we can pick up an enormous amount about another human being just by exchanging a couple of sentences. It's not yet knowledge; it's an intuition that motivates you to want to find out more.

A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.

If fiction changes things, it's usually because it's a powerful way of exploring social issues. And it helps us to understand people who are different from us.

It's never that hard for me to imagine what it must feel like to be someone else, whether it's an American teenage girl or a Japanese octogenarian man.

Basic emotions can be conveyed through anything. As long as you show people that you're human, they'll relate to it.

The idea of faking empathy to take a step forward to understanding - it's a really powerful idea.

Writing is weaponized empathy. It's putting yourself in someone else's head. It's finding what's in them that relates to you.

I think, at the end of the day, acting and activism are both about empathy. You're trying to get people to see other people as real and human. And to care.