Steven Pinker Quotes

I don't think you have to have experienced things to understand them.

I just try to put myself in the minds of all the characters.

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

Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else's shoes for a while.

Books teach children to see the world through the eyes of others and empathise with others. It's about the story.

When you start to develop your powers of empathy and imagination, the whole world opens up to you.

Becoming a reader grows our horizons, our appetite for the good, the true and the beautiful, and our empathy.

Throughout my career as a lawyer, teacher and labor leader, books have remained my constant companion - stuffed into a briefcase, overflowing on my bedside table, stacked on my desk at work. Books have carried me to distant worlds, opened new doors and made me feel empathy, compassion, anger, fear, joy, acceptance - and everything in between.

Reading opens your mind and helps you understand and empathize with people who are unlike you and outside your breadth of experience.

My job is all about getting inside another person's mind and thoughts.

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

Empathy is not as complicated when you have some aspects in common with your character; it's not impossible to know someone who's like you in many ways but different in one. This is true especially if you are a reader. Reading makes you accustomed to inhabiting other lives and sensibilities.

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.

Imaginative empathy is one of the great gifts that humans have, and it means that we can live more than one life. We can picture what it would be like from another perspective.

The story is a machine for empathy. In contrast to logic or reason, a story is about emotion that gets staged over a sequence of dramatic moments, so you empathize with the characters without really thinking about it too much. It is a really powerful tool for imagining yourself in other people's situations.

Sympathy is the first condition of criticism.

Students read for tests and because their parents ask them to, but I think it's very important to tell children that you can read for fun, too, and to understand human spirit. It builds empathy.

If you read literature, you put yourself in somebody else's shoes. You learn from great figures in literature.

Well, I think that if you sincerely try to imagine what life is like for another person - not in a mocking way, not in a satirical way, but in a sincere, compassionate way - I don't think that's exploitive.

Walk a mile in my shoes is good advice. Our children will learn to respect others if they are used to imagining themselves in another's place.

People who don't read seem to me mysterious. I don't know how they think or learn about other people. Novels are a very important part of our education.

Kids don't read as much as you'd like them to, just in terms of seeing the world from different perspectives. I mean, that's the great thing about books, still. Here's television, here are the movies, and it's pretty limited in terms of the perspectives.

I love to lose myself in other men's minds.

I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.

It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope.