Michelle Obama Quotes

A film can open hearts and minds that have been closed, for whatever reasons.

As actors and directors, I feel like our job, more so than anything else, is to shine a light on a subject and to let people know that they're not alone.

If you have the power to see things through somebody else's eyes, it's like going from black and white to color or two dimensions to three dimensions.

I see myself as a witness to humanity.

Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else's shoes for a while.

I connect with kids easily. They bring out the maternal side in me.

At least I had that, one guy understood me.

Poetry is partly sympathy, don't you think? If it's any good, it gets people to think about others' points of view.

I think one of my better gifts as a writer is empathy.

I wanted to write about looking at the world, so it's more about helping people, or persuading people, to see what is around us; both the marvellous and the terrible.

One of the main reasons I write fiction is to try to understand what life is like for people other than myself, to try to see the world through my characters' eyes. I often find that I'm able to understand certain emotional truths about my own life by exploring things from different vantages.

It's a terrific privilege to be able to see into somebody else's life.

Once you really commence to see things, then you really commence to feel things.

Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.

Metaphorically speaking, it's easy to bump into one another on the journey from A to B and not even notice. People should take time to notice, enjoy and help each other.

When I hear other people's stories, I like to believe that they contribute to my 'Encyclopedia of Human Experience.' The stories I hear help me expand my definition of what love is, what pain feels like, what sacrifice means, what laughter can do.

To love a person is to know and love the person. But we can pick up an enormous amount about another human being just by exchanging a couple of sentences. It's not yet knowledge; it's an intuition that motivates you to want to find out more.

I see only defects because I'm not following the scene as it were. I'm not following the other person. It's like the best thing to clarify this is the theater.

Understand that everybody has their own struggles, regardless of whether you can see it or not. Just surround yourself with the people who love you, and know you're not really alone.

Where there is no human connection, there is no compassion. Without compassion, then community, commitment, loving-kindness, human understanding, and peace all shrivel. Individuals become isolated, the isolated turn cruel, and the tragic hovers in the forms of domestic and civil violence. Art and literature are antidotes to that.

We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts.

When you start to develop your powers of empathy and imagination, the whole world opens up to you.

It's only possible to see people when one is able to see the world as others see it.

People want to feel understood by their leaders.

When you read about the lives of other people, people of different circumstances or similar circumstances, you are part of their lives for that moment. You inhabit their lives, and you feel what they're feeling, and that is compassion. If we see that reading does allow us that, we see how absolutely essential reading is.