Sam Richards Quotes

If you don't open your eyes to other people's lives, you can't even begin to understand how the world works at all.

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.

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?

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

Be kind. It's worthwhile to make an effort to learn about other people and figure out what you might have in common with them. If you allow yourself to be somewhat curious - and if you get into the habit of doing that - it's the first step to being open minded and realizing that your points of view aren't totally opposite.

I have no patience for anyone who thinks they've figured things out, no patience for people who think they're right at the expense of everyone else. The world is too connected and too complicated to conform to any of our rigid ideas of what it should be like.

Trying to imagine what it's like to be someone else is never a substitute for actually living that way, for acknowledging the respect that we need to have for each other's experiences.

When you are in someone's home, in their bed, you see the world from their eyes. You understand 'the other' is not so other.

I love taking people on that journey, which I feel like can open them up to seeing human beings a little more complexly. People that you originally don't like, maybe they have reasons for the way they are, and maybe we can start to understand each other a little better as opposed to being quick to judge and dismiss people.

I feel like the world would be a better place if more people experienced a little bit of someone else's experience.

For me, when we're all human beings, it's just interesting that we cannot understand the other person or how they think. That's one part of the human aspect that fascinates me.

That's always what I've tried to do. I've tried to communicate. But at the end of the day, it's still for you to understand something. Understand that the world is bigger than you.

Part of our job as storytellers is to show people pockets of the world that they don't know. The more we understand, the more we don't judge.

The greatest tragedy for any human being is going through their entire lives believing the only perspective that matters is their own.

And rather than judging and alienating others, I do think there's an opportunity that no one is taking, myself included, to actually understand why somebody is coming from a certain place.

Each of us is living our own private journey, and the more we know about each other, the healthier and happier the world will be.

There are so many things admirable people do not understand.

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

The man who can put himself in the place of other men, who can understand the workings of their minds, need never worry about what the future has in store for him.

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.

You have to walk in the other guy's moccasins. You have to think what they think. If you want to bring somebody onto your side, you have to figure out what motivates them. What do they need?

Sometimes films ignore other points of view because it's simpler to tell the story that way, but the more genuine and sympathetic you are to different points of view and situations, the more real the story is.

I think most people try to get others to see through their eyes.

For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like 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.