Margaret J. Wheatley Quotes

You can't tell stories and really walk in someone's shoes and not have a love for them, even if they're doing horrible things.

It is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know.

When you know someone's story, it becomes much harder to hate them.

Frankly, there isn't anyone you couldn't learn to love once you've heard their story.

When you really know somebody you can’t hate them. Or maybe it’s just that you can’t really know them until you stop hating them.

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.

If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.

I think that no matter how dark a person is, the more you learn about them, the more you understand about their life, the more you can sympathize with them or even root for them.

The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others.

Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.

The opposite of anger is not calmness, its empathy.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

Sometimes someone that is the 'villain' in your life, when you look deeper and you think of what their issues are and why they behave like that and where they came from - they become less of a villain and more of someone that you can understand.

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.

We can scarcely hate any one that we know.

Don't judge any man until you have walked two moons in his moccasins.

Hatred is increased by being reciprocated, and can on the other hand be destroyed by love.

I think that's an incredible thing that we can do as actors - to feel empathy toward someone that you may otherwise detest, you know?

I consider all drama to be the opportunity to see the world from another person's point of view. That seems to be the point of drama, really. And thereby to encourage understanding and even love.

I'm not gonna say I'm the greatest guy, but the reason I don't hate is I know what it feels like to be hated. So I always pull for Tom Brady.

There's nobody you can't love once you know their story. I believe that to be, in the majority, true.

Before passing a judgement on somebody just give it a thought about what he or she went through.

You have to understand, my dears, that the shortest distance between truth and a human being is a story.

When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity . . . that was a quality God's image carried with it . . . when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.

One must put oneself in every one's position. To understand everything is to forgive everything.