Quotes About Understanding

For me, empathy is an existential question - it's about the survival of the human race. That is, it's imperative for us to overcome the challenges we face.

If we have any hope for survival of the music that we all love, compassion must replace name-calling, fairness must replace greed, and we need to come together as a musical community and try to understand each other's problems.

The ability to sympathize with those around us seems crucial to our survival, and it's connected to the mirroring functions of the brain.

I feel like a survivor from an age that people no longer understand. I want to try to explain what the 1930s - the golden age of Hollywood - was truly like. People forget that America was such a different place then, not yet the dominant force in the world.

Man's mind is so formed that it is far more susceptible to falsehood than to truth.

People who can't speak Russian will be less susceptible to Russian propaganda. But they will also be less susceptible to the poetry of Joseph Brodsky.

Living the life I have lived - being raised by deaf parents, assimilating to a different culture, and the challenges I have faced over time - has given me insight to the fact that each person has their own complex, intricate story, and it's rarely what I suspect it is. We must have compassion and grace for each other. We must.

When my kids correct my cultural missteps, I sometimes suspect that they're not embarrassed, they're gleeful.

I suspect that we get used to particular sorts of stories being presented in particular sorts of ways, and we're so used to interpreting them and understanding what it is they're doing that we think of those forms and styles as faithful, complete depictions of reality.

I don't know how much love David felt - I suspect very little. My main appeal to him was as a nurse, cook, housekeeper, creative ally, and business adviser.

The real use of imaginative reading is precisely to suspend one's mind in the workings of another sensibility.

Intuition is a suspension of logic due to impatience.

Conflict grows out of ignorance and suspicion.

After September 11, 2001, I was feeling like I really wanted more understanding between cultures. It seemed to me that so much of what happened on September 11 was because people didn't understand each other and were suspicious of each other.

By itself, love is never enough to sustain a relationship.

Breughel is an example of an artist - I mean, this is true about artists and painters in general, but he is a specific example of an artist whose work contains more than you think it does at first glance. Whose work rewards, sustains attention and looking.

It's not all about looks. If someone can sustain a good intellectual 'conversation, I find that very 'attractive.

I felt like I was growing up with two different churches, in a sense. And that's always stayed with me - not just the religion of it - but the day-to-day understanding that these beliefs, that faith itself, is something that I need as something to sustain me.

For better or for worse, I just have to be on tour for some portion of the year. But it's not easy, you know. It's not easy on the people you love, and I understand when people look at this life and say this isn't sustainable.

The ease and pleasure of a long marriage is like gold dust. You feel fed and sustained and that you're intimately known.

But what does interest me is the notion that if you do a lot of work it means there's a potential for other people to understand that a lot of things are possible with a sustained effort and that the broadening of experiences is possible and I think that's all art can be.

Female friendships have sustained me from my earliest days as a child.

A man must now swallow more belief than he can digest.

If you state the obvious long enough, other people will pick up on what you're talking about and examine it. And usually they'll swallow it.