Hilary Swank Quotes

I think my job is hopefully to connect with people emotionally and to feel less alone or understand things in a certain way.

We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try.

For the first time, I saw what was in his heart, and I wondered if he might ever want to look deep enough to see mine.

I like all my characters in one way or another, or at least I understand them.

I like reading novels because it provides insight into human behavior. I am really interested in feelings and think they are what define us as a species. When you really get it right in acting, it's an act of empathy. You feel less distant from others, and that is really exciting.

But what do we know of the heart nearest to our own? What do we know of our own heart?

I'm entirely interested in people, and also other creatures and beings, but especially in people, and I tend to read them by emotional field more than anything. So I have a special interest in what they're thinking and who they are and who's hiding behind those eyes and how did he get there, and what's the story, really?

All writing is presumption, of course, since no one knows what it is like to be another human being.

It's fun playing a more feminine part. I can identify more with a woman of passion and emotion than with a cartoon character. Who knows what a cartoon feels?

I enjoy learning about other people. I really didn't understand that until 'Moonlight.'

Good characters don't believe they're bad. As long as you as an actor believe in them and try to understand them, it's not hard to have empathy and sympathy.

It's easy for us to feel separate from other people and from other forms of life, especially if we don't have a reliable connection to our own inner world. Without insight into our internal cycles of pleasure and pain, desires and fears, there is a strong sense of being removed, apart or disconnected. When we do have an understanding of our inner lives, it provides an intuitive opening, even without words, to the ties that exist between ourselves and others.

Women's eyes are rapid in detecting a heart which is ill at ease with itself, and, knowing the value of sympathy, and finding their own greatest happiness not in receiving it, but in giving it, with them to be unhappy is at once to be interesting.

Tell my brother to remember his heart in all things. That is where his honor and his destiny will be found. Tell him.

I don't hate anybody. My character is one thing, but me as an individual is completely different.

There’s nothing to it. All you have to do is take a close look at yourself and you will understand everyone else. We’re in no way different ourselves... You show me someone who can’t understand people and I’ll show you someone who has built up a false image of himself.

If you want to know me, look inside your heart.

I pout my lower lip for a second, but then I grin as the pieces come together in my mind. "THAT'S why you like me!" I exclaim. "Because you're not very nice either! It makes so much more sense now.

When we know to read our own hearts, we acquire wisdom of the heartsof others.

Making a U-turn from our thoughts to our feelings re-connects us to our own inner experience and creates the grounds for connecting with others in a more authentic way. It's a movement from head to heart.

To the extent to which you know yourself, and we are all more alike than different, you can know others. When you love yourself, you will love others. And to the depth and extent to which you can love yourself, only to that depth and extent will you be able to love others.

There is no key to open the heart of another - except curiosity.

The primary urge that motivates and engenders writing...is the writer's desire to invent and tell a story, and to know himself. But the more I write, the more I feel the force of the other urge, which collaborates with and completes the first one: the desire to know the Other from within him. To feel what it means to be another person. To be able to touch, if only for a moment, the blaze that burns within another human being.

It's hard to put yourself in someone else's head.