Quotes About Understanding

Culture hides much more than it reveals, and strangely enough, what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants.

We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself.

It is more important to know what sort of person has a disease than to know what sort of disease a person has.

Nothing is more terrible than to see ignorance in action.

I get huge solace from chaos, especially if someone else is doing it, too, like, 'Thank God it's not just me!'

Being a mom makes you far more compassionate. You have more empathy for people, more love. I was always taught to say thank you, and I'm very grateful. And my kids have that quality, too.

Older teens tend to write to me and say, 'Thank you for not writing down to teenagers.'

I know plenty of people who don't have children. And I also get a lot of people who say, 'Thank you for speaking out; my family don't understand why I don't want kids.'

People want to help me. They want the best for me. I always say thank you to people when they try that. I never get mad.

Men tend to listen in what I call a reductive way, which is to say for a point, for a solution. You know, we like to have a problem and solve it. Bang. Thank you very much. On to the next thing.

I think my mother is my biggest influence. There are so many things I hate about her but at the same time I'm thankful for her. All I know is that when I'm a parent I want to be just like my mom. I can talk to my mom more than any of my friends could talk to their parents.

I think pain is a very - it's an extremely hard thing to empathize moment to moment. And you often don't remember your own pain, you know, that moment that you broke a limb or you burned yourself or, I think, this is a common thing that women talk about with childbirth, that the memory of the pain is hard to summon up and relive, thankfully.

Thankfully, I have never experienced a miscarriage, but I have friends and family who have, and I've talked to them about their feelings.

Thankfully, I found athletics. My mum didn't like it at first, but the funny thing is that, now, she's the biggest athletics fan out there. She's a real expert, and she's got all the heptathlon books.

No one even knows one percent of the fabulous history of Man; but thanks to history, we know about occurrences that go beyond the limits of the imaginable.

One of the things I've learned from 'Borgen' is that it's very easy to criticise people; 'I hate this politician, I hate what they do.' You are doing this right now with Margaret Thatcher, but sometimes it's hard to be a politician. I'm not defending Margaret Thatcher, but we believe our statesmen are also human beings.

The first thing anyone can do, about any issue, is get informed.

As an actor, the first thing you learn in drama school is you never judge.

The first thing I didn't understand was my life. It's a mystery. And today I don't understand economy or politics. I don't know why politics or economy are destroying the world, but I will understand after understanding.

My wife has always been positive. In the hospital my brother-in-law was trying to prepare her for the worst, but she said, 'Hold on, I don't want to hear that. He'll be all right. I'm going to ring BMW now and order a car with manual controls because the first thing he'll want to do when he leaves hospital is drive.' She knew her husband!

When you walk into those situations that have a lot of conflict in them, the first thing to do is to be present enough to allow the other person to speak first. You're not giving power away; you're actually allowing them to feel seen and understood.

The first thing I do when I read a part is see if I can identify emotionally with a character. If I make that connection, everything else is just working on knowing their life circumstances and manifesting those through practice and research.

With every character, the first thing I want to feel is empathy.

The first thing you should do with an actor is not sign a contract with him. Take him to dinner. And take him for a walk afterwards.