Gavin Hood Quotes

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.

We think empathy is innate, but it's not. It's a muscle you're working.

Stories teach us empathy. They reveal to us ourselves in the skins of others.

Fiction challenges us and works its miracles by placing us in the skin of another human being and teaching us empathy.

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.

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.

I think, at the end of the day, acting and activism are both about empathy. You're trying to get people to see other people as real and human. And to care.

If acting has any meaning, it is so that we can have greater empathy for other people.

My career has been driven with the hope of telling stories, as it helps me to judge people less.

It's not a very nice thing to not have empathy. I would like to have empathy. In the past I haven't been very empathetic with other people.

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.

It requires something more than personal experience to gain a philosophy or point of view from any specific event. It is the quality of our response to the event and our capacity to enter into the lives of others that help us to make their lives and experiences our own. In my own case my convictions have derived and developed from events in the lives of others as well as from my own experience. What I have seen meted out to others by authority and repression, economic and political, transcends anything I myself may have endured.

Reading can almost be viewed as empathy training. Movies have better action scenes, sure. But books are uniquely suited to showing you the inside of another person's head. That is the root of empathy. That's the first step to understanding you're not alone in the world.

We have to listen to other people's stories. That's the thing. And that's the only way that we eventually get to know ourselves.

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

Developing our sympathetic compassion is not only possible but the only reason for us to be here on earth.

I've never been interested in things that sparkle and shine; I'm more interested in 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.

Positive social emotions like compassion and empathy are generally good for us, and we want to encourage them. But do we know how to most reliably raise children to care about the suffering of other people? I'm not sure we do.

If I hadn't read all of Jane Austen and DH Lawrence, Tolstoy and Proust, as well as the more fun stuff, I wouldn't know how to break bad news, how to sympathise, how to be a friend or a lover, because I wouldn't have any idea what was going on in anybody else's mind.

To share our stories is not only a worthwhile endeavor for the storyteller, but for those who hear our stories and feel less alone because of it.

The story is a machine for empathy. In contrast to logic or reason, a story is about emotion that gets staged over a sequence of dramatic moments, so you empathize with the characters without really thinking about it too much. It is a really powerful tool for imagining yourself in other people's situations.

My concern is how we learn to be genuine human beings.

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

At the end of the day, stories connect us, not politics. And there's so many stories out there waiting to be told. It's just a matter of who's out there listening.