Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

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

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

You don't know what it's like to be me.

If you're too lucky, it can be very easy to lack the ability to believe that other people's lived experience is real when it doesn't match up with yours.

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

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.

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

Nobody knows what another person is thinking. They may imagine they do, but they are nearly always wrong.

Admiration is the emotion furthest from understanding. ~Sosuke Aizen

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

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.

You can't tell what a man is like or what he is thinking when you are looking at him. You must get around behind him and see what he has been looking at.

Many men honestly do not know what women want, and women honestly do not know why men find what they want so hard to comprehend and deliver.

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

To think justly, we must understand what others mean. To know the value of our thoughts, we must try their effect on other minds.

I have all the defects of other people yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.

The woman's vision is deep reaching, the man's far reaching. With the man the world is his heart, with the woman the heart is her world.

Can you step back from your own mind and thus understand all things?

Literally, no man ever sees himself as others see him. No photograph or reflection ever gives us the same slant on ourselves that others see. It has often been proved on the witness stand that no two people ever see the same accident precisely the same way. We see through different eyes and from different angles. But if we could see things as other people see them, we could come closer to knowing why they do what they do and why they say what they say.

Said one oyster to a neighboring oyster, "I have a very great pain within me. It is heavy and round and I am in distress." And the other oyster replied with haughty complacence, "Praise be to the heavens and to the sea, I have no pain within me. I am well and whole both within and without." At that moment a crab was passing by and heard the two oysters, and he said to the one who was well and whole both within and without, "Yes, you are well and whole; but the pain that your neighbor bears is a pearl of exceeding beauty."

As a performer, I'm constantly fascinated with the idea of being able to know what anybody else's experience is, and how misleading all informatives, like appearance, can be.

I believe a writer's most important skill lies in being able to see things from different perspectives.

A fool sees himself as another, but a wise man sees others as himself.

It was easier to know a character's point of view than it was to figure out what your point of view was.

You look at someone long enough, you discover their humanity.