Quotes About Empathy

I suppose we're not supposed to judge people.

I suppose, the natural outgrowth about writing about two friends, it becomes about their friendship, and the complexities of it, and the way personality plays off each other, and what they each like to do, separately and together.

I am interested in outsiders. I suppose I have always felt like one myself.

I don't like narrowing my readers down - there's not a particular age or gender or nationality. I suppose I'm aiming at the child I was.

Anyone who has lost a child will tell you that they don't recover their sense of endless possibility. Some people hide that well. But after a certain age, almost everyone is carrying something like that around, I suppose.

I forgive very easily, and I suppose, in the same way, I expect to be forgiven very easily as well. I grew up with that.

I'm not better than anyone else. I'm not supposed to be on a pedestal. I've always stayed away from that.

My approach is always the same. I try to be as honest as possible. Find the real honesty and humanity in the character because even a fictional character is supposed to feel real. And my job is to find that reality and bring it to the screen.

I hate people who splash their own pain on covers, like the whole world should hear about them. Why are we all supposed to be interested in one individual's suffering?

Why are women always the ones who have to forgive? If you cheated on a man, he would be like, 'You're disgusting, and I want nothing to do with you.' But women, we're supposed to be like, 'He messed up. He made a mistake.'

I think if the church did what they were supposed to do we wouldn't have anyone sleeping on the streets.

You're supposed to have friends you can tell anything to.

The Bible says, 'Judge not lest ye be judged.' Our lives are supposed to be hospitals, not courtrooms.

I think a lot of what is going on with kids who get pushed too far and attempt either murder or suicide is that they are trying to deal with their own non-existence for the people who are supposed to care most for them.

You're supposed to remember, and still forgive.

Supposedly I'm impossible to talk to. But it's honestly not me being difficult. Sometimes you just don't have a lot to say.

But now, I think I have found a corner, a groove of what kind of stories I want to be part of and what type of characters I want to play. I have a soft corner for damaged people or those who are not supposedly quintessentially perfect but have the instincts to be protective.

I think we have to be very careful how we treat people, even when we are supposedly trying to help them.

The rage of someone who continues to strive so hard and work so hard but is interrupted every day by society, by racism, by white supremacy, by the patriarchy - how can you not feel empathy?

It only takes two seconds of your life to say, 'I don't agree with white supremacy. I don't agree with homophobia.'

When I'm around people having conversations about their day, I'm looking at them, like, 'What could they possibly be talking about? How are we not talking about deconstructing white supremacy right now? How are we not trying to save trans people?'

I made a supreme effort not to do that thing that parents do, which is to bore people without children to death by going on and on about how funny their children are, so there's none of that hopefully.

I'm a people pleaser. I hold a lot of things in. I'm always making sure everybody is okay. I usually don't rage; I usually don't curse.

Positive social emotions like compassion and empathy are generally good for us, and we want to encourage them. But do we know how to most reliably raise children to care about the suffering of other people? I'm not sure we do.