Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes

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

We must put ourselves in the place of those who are to hear us

I think the ability to empathize with another person's experience and go into the trajectory of their journey is challenging.

Art, when done well, creates empathy.

We will always need to be reminded that we are human. Art gives us that.

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.

Imaginative empathy is one of the great gifts that humans have, and it means that we can live more than one life. We can picture what it would be like from another perspective.

Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation. This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do - it can make us identify with situations and people far away.

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.

If you can open people's hearts first, then maybe people's minds get opened after that.

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.

You don't accomplish a lot by changing people's opinions by shoving facts down their throat. I think you change people's opinions by opening your heart up and showing the parallels between you and another person. That's how people's ideas shift.

Writing really evokes empathy in a way very few things can do.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

I think we've all been kind of... everyone's been hurt, everyone's felt loss, everyone has exultation, everyone has a need to be loved, or to have lost love, so when you play a character, you're pulling out those little threads and turning them up a bit.

Poetry is emotion, passion, love, grief - everything that is human. It is not for zombies by zombies.

You don’t address their brains. You address their hearts.

All advocacy is, at its core, an exercise in empathy.

I will never actually be able to know what it's like to go through life in someone else's body.

I don't think you can create art out of anger; it has to come out of some form of understanding. You have to feel good about who you are and that you could do something to change things.

If you operate under the premise that everybody already has some experiences that could be sources of empathy for them, I wonder if there's some process of coaxing people into tapping into that knowledge.

There's a power in empathy.

You have to put yourself in people's shoes in certain situations because you don't know what people really think or what they're really going through.

I just think there's a real art in listening. I need to listen.

I realized that a great deal of life is exactly and precisely about being able to feel pain: my own and other people's.