Owen D. Young Quotes

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.

A helpful thing for me has always been - this is from a great acting teacher Declan Donnellan - is this beautiful way of expressing how and why people do things that other people may not do. It's a simple sentence that says, 'I understand you; you don't understand me.'

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.

When I was young I used to listen to other people and to try and understand what they thought and where they were coming from. I listened and didn't speak.

I will never actually be able to know what it's like to go through life in someone else's body.

For most of your career, what you're trying to do is to step into other people's shoes.

If acting has any meaning, it is so that we can have greater empathy for other people.

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

Empathy begins with understanding life from another person's perspective. Nobody has an objective experience of reality. It's all through our own individual prisms.

Sensitivity doesn't necessarily make you easy to get on with.

How can you build something for someone else if you don't have enough familiarity with them to imagine the world through their eyes?

That's what I love doing - understanding another person's perspective that's really different from mine. To me, it's like an emotional puzzle, trying to figure out the humanity of a character who is very different from myself and why they think the way they do.

When you truly empathize with someone, you have to take into account all the things that make that person who they are.

It's always easier to dismiss other people than to go through the awkward and time consuming process of understanding them.

People are starting to understand the other side's perspective and that's where empathy can sort of begin - once you quit judging other people but just understand where they're coming from.

Changing your attitude from self-centerdness to understanding requires desire and commitment to always try to see things from the other persons point of view.

Empathy requires knowing that you know nothing.

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

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 taught myself to tune in to another person's wavelength, figure out what they were looking for, and try to project that thing back at them.

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.

One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.

I think that I have a sensitivity toward people, and that is a strength.

I wanted to live the inner life of every man I saw, look at the world through his eyes.