Walter Bagehot Quotes

This is going to sound pretentious and esoteric, but I truly mean it from the bottom of my heart. Acting has always been a spiritual journey for me. The very first project I ever acted on paralleled my experience so perfectly even before I was aware of it.

Some people spend their time and thoughts in feeling, hearing, seeing, and listening. Whatever cannot be felt or experienced they will not accept. We call these people 'emotional.'

With dancing, so much is about sexuality and sensuality and without life experience it becomes much more of a performance, rather than a living, breathing entity from the soul.

Everybody always tells you what an awesome and unique experience being a parent is. Words can never do the feeling justice.

I'm not a super emotional person, so that's one reason I love acting - it makes me deal with myself in that kind of way.

I guess I have a talent for humiliation, a place within me that experience can't reach, which is terrible in real life but something that comes in handy in writing. It seems as though humiliation has become a career for me.

Yes, all my songs come from personal experience and relationships.

It's like trying to describe what you feel when you're standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon or remembering your first love or the birth of your child. You have to be there to really know what it's like.

Anything that opens you up emotionally is going to impact your acting. Parenthood, becoming a mom, certainly does that.

Obviously an actor draws on his own experience.

'Control' had to do with my own life a lot, and that's why that seemed to be a film I could be the director of, because I had an emotional attachment to the whole story. And because of that experience, I feel that I can try other films. I didn't set out to become a director.

I have to experience all the ghastly, bottomless depths for life for myself; it's for that reason that I went to war, and for that reason I volunteered.

My poems - I don't even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience.

When you write, no matter what, it ends up personal.

I want to see sunrises in the mountains. You never get to see such things enough in a lifetime. I want to see more.

We can see every square metre of the planet on Google Earth. But there is no substitute for that sensory experience of going out into the world and discovering things for yourself.

You know one of the things about going from modeling to acting is it's so much more fulfilling. With modeling, you get your picture taken, which is great, good for you, you know? But in acting, you're able to reach in and show a little bit more of yourself.

Tell them to go and see their own land—visit the National Parks…

Gaga came to me, and I just could not find a soul. I come from church; maybe that has something to do with it. I like to get to the soul of a person. I just didn't feel a soul.

We're in soul business here.

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.

What we are, the experiences we've had, come to the surface.

Use what you know. Draw from it. It doesnt always mean plot or fact. It means capturing a truth from your experiencing it, expressing values you personally feel deep down in your core.

And yet, words are the passkeys to our souls. Without them, we can't really share the enormity of our lives.

The mere animal pleasure of travelling in a wild unexplored country is also great. The effect of travel on a man whose heart is in the right place is that the mind is made more self-reliant: it becomes more confident of its own resources, there is greater presence of mind.