George Saunders Quotes

As human beings, we aren't as individual as we'd like to believe we are. And I think that's what makes acting possible. Despite the fact that I have not experienced something, I have it in my human capacity to imagine it and to put myself in someone else's shoes, and to take someone else's circumstances personally.

Our stories are different; our pain is the same.

Only the artists interest me whose hearts beat in unison with the poignant misery of the world. If you have not felt that, you have not lived. Pity is essential.

Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.

The tragedy of life is in what dies inside a man while he lives - the death of genuine feeling, the death of inspired response, the awareness that makes it possible to feel the pain or the glory of other men in yourself.

… people never become a mass, they remain entities, and so you are able to feel human suffering and make others feel it because it is represented to you by individuals

Most people enjoy other people. Most people are human beings first. And affiliated with political parties second.

Empathy is about two people - two people meeting, getting to know each other and tuning in to what the other person is thinking and feeling.

Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatesoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer.

It's hard to pull apart empathy from compassion. What is really clear is that we innately care for other people at least to some extent.

We are all human beings, immigrant or non-immigrant. We all feel fear. We all love and become confused when we don't act as well as we would like to. We all get depressed and have feelings of uselessness. All of these things are true and have always been true.

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 toddling little girl is a centre of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.

I always think that if you look at anyone in detail, you will have empathy for them because you recognize them as a human being, no matter what they've done.

I don't really have a lot of appropriate feelings for people on an individual basis, but I've always wanted to make people happy.

I'm a humanist at heart: at the end of the day, we are all human beings.

I tell stories about people audiences might think they have nothing in common with, then they emotionally connect with them and find they're not different at all.

I'm a mammal at the end. I breathe out and breathe in and eat. At the end, when we go to sleep, nobody lives this political definition. It's something we connect by and we try to understand each other by, but at the end, we know that this is not who we are.

Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself.

We must develop a deeper interest and greater understanding of the people we meet here or abroad. Like us, they are passengers on board that mysterious ship called life.

Just because people think politically different to you doesn't mean they're inhuman.

There are those moments when you shake someone's hand, have a conversation with someone, and suddenly your all bound together because you share your humanity in one simple moment.

Coming to know one another based on a shared humanity through dialogue is the key to breaking down the walls of isolation and reversing the decline of life-to-life bonds among human beings.

We are all quick to point out all the differences but not as willing to accept what bonds us as humans.

It's difficult to have any animosity towards someone if you recognize that on so many levels they're exactly the same as you.