Barack Obama Quotes

I was fifteen years old when I understood how it is that things break down: people can't imagine someone else's point of view.

I think that if we don't learn to inhabit other people's perspectives, then we're never going to understand why people do what they do.

Listening is terribly important if you want to understand anything about people. You listen to what they say and how they say it, what they share and what they are reticent about, what they tell truthfully and what they lie about, what they hope for and what they fear, what they are proud of, what they are ashamed of. If you don't pay attention to other people, how can you understand their choices through time and how their stories come out?

I can't not put myself in the shoes of every person I pass.

I feel like I can get a good feel for people.

One way to overcome our natural self-centeredness is to try to see things from other people's perspectives.

This has been her problem all her life: picturing other people's responses. She's too good at it. She can picture the response of anyone--other people's reactions, their emotions, their criticisms, their demands--but somehow they don't reciprocate. Maybe they can't. Maybe they lack the gift, if it is one.

People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.

If you can identify with people, you can empathize with people and therefore you understand things.

The biggest deficit that we have in our society and in the world right now is an empathy deficit. We are in great need of people being able to stand in somebody else's shoes and see the world through their eyes.

The ability to understand people is a choice.

It's got to do with putting yourself in other people's shoes and seeing how far you can come to truly understand them. I like the empathy that comes from acting.

If fiction changes things, it's usually because it's a powerful way of exploring social issues. And it helps us to understand people who are different from us.

It's never that hard for me to imagine what it must feel like to be someone else, whether it's an American teenage girl or a Japanese octogenarian man.

… people can't imagine someone else's point of view.

It's kind of funny that I've been branded as the empathy lady when, really, what I'm doing is questioning and interrogating empathy.

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.

A love of reading shows empathy, the desire to understand how others live or act or might act - and why.

It is only through literature that one can put oneself in someone else’s shoes and understand the other’s different and contradictory sides and refrain from becoming too ruthless. Outside the sphere of literature only one aspect of individuals is revealed. But if you understand their different dimensions you cannot easily murder 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.

While people judge others from their own moral standpoint, the wise person looks also at the point of view of another.

It is, for example, axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more sensitive than other people because, when we are insensitive in our dealings with others, we cannot be aware of it at the time: conscious insensitivity is a self-contradiction.

one never knows really how things are with other people, they just do always seem more spirited than oneself somehow.

That person is most cultivated who is able to put himself in the place of the greatest number of other persons.