John D. MacDonald Quotes

Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention.

When thou findest thyself scorning another, look then at thy own heart and laugh at thy folly.

Most of your suffering comes from the lack of understanding of yourself and others.

I am a really sensitive person.

I've always been interested in how other people live their lives, which is why it's important to engage fully even in painful times. And out of that, I get to laugh.

I enjoy learning about other people. I really didn't understand that until 'Moonlight.'

I'm trying to use myself and my own flawedness as a metaphor for general human experience. I'm trying to 'stand next to' a subject, whether it's Bobby Knight or Vince Carter, and use that subject to meditate on both him and me.

I am a very sensitive person.

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.

That only shows you have no heart,’ she said. But her eyes said that she knew he had a heart, and that was why she was afraid of him

I wasn't really testing it on myself as much as I was learning from other people about what it meant to live and love with your whole heart, and then thinking, oh my god, I'm not doing that.

Lack of sensitivity is perhaps basically an unawareness of ourselves.

When we take time to quiet ourselves, we can all sense that our life could be lived with greater compassion and greater weakness.

It's not that I'm a very good person. It's that I think I should at least look at the ways in which I am not a good person, the ways in which I so readily become the person who would not notice that the wonderful clothing I'm wearing someone is probably dying for.

Not being in touch with your vulnerability and not learning to own it and accept it and be comfortable with it leaves you in a position where you're liable to look at and judge other people for being vulnerable because they're reflecting that part of yourself that you're not comfortable with.

Do not be reactive and vengeful and if you look deeply into your anguish, you will see that it is the anguish of our wounded collective soul.

The more you look into and understand yourself, the less judgmental you become towards others.

Great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us how to face our feelings and face our actions and to have new inklings about what they mean. A good novel of any year can initiate us into our own new experience.

When Nehemiah's heart was broken he paid attention to his broken heart.

all the advice you ever gave your partner is for you to hear

Take the blinders from your vision take the padding from your ears and confess you've heard me crying and admit you've seen my tears.

I respect anybody that is very in tune with their feelings.

We're coming to the peak, I think soon, before we have to come back to, like, humanity. Humanity needs to look, and it hasn't been looking for so long.

I didn't know what life was about before 'Love Sonia.' I didn't care. Now I'm a different person.

I'm a very sensitive person.