Quotes About Empathy

I still feel very close to the people I wrote shows with and some of the people I toured with. I feel very close to them, like a family or like college friends who you know and who have seen you at your worst and you spend 14 hours driving a van all piled on top of each other.

The chances of getting Townes to like it were very remote. When I wrote 'Til I Gain Control Again,' Townes Van Zandt sort of nodded. And I thought, 'Yes!'

I knew Townes Van Zandt a little bit.

Find a beautiful piece of art. If you fall in love with Van Gogh or Matisse or John Oliver Killens, or if you fall love with the music of Coltrane, the music of Aretha Franklin, or the music of Chopin - find some beautiful art and admire it, and realize that that was created by human beings just like you, no more human, no less.

I love what Monet, Picasso, Van Gogh and Jesus all said - that love is really the driving principle of the creative act. In fact, they would say that great art is always inspired by love.

I've always been really fascinated by Vincent van Gogh.

What makes people the world over stand in line for Van Gogh is not that they will see beautiful pictures but that in an indefinable way they will come away feeling better human beings. And that is exactly what Van Gogh hoped for.

I went down to the prison in Menard, thinking we were the vanguard, but down there, I got down on my knees and listened and learned from the people.

There should be no strife with the vanquished or the dead.

Occasionally, Americans in large numbers are moved by a vanquished athlete's grief. Larry Bird with a towel over his head in 1979 comes immediately to mind. But more often, sports fans do the opposite - they delight in the desolation of a defeated archrival.

Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else's thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person's vantage point.

In nearly every religion I am aware of, there is a variation of the golden rule. And even for the non-religious, it is a tenet of people who believe in humanistic principles.

Readers will stay with an author, no matter what the variations in style and genre, as long as they get that sense of story, of character, of empathetic involvement.

People rarely speak of children; you hear of 'cohort groups' and 'standard variations,' but you don't hear much of boys who miss their cats or 6-year-olds who have to struggle with potato balls.

I like to explore characters who are very different to me, or varied parts are very similar to me.

I'd say that I'm a really quite a joyful person in general, but I think the idea of joy can be extremely complex, and rich and varied.

Most of the people at my headline shows are in their 20s, but it varies a ton: like, I've had a six-year-old hug my leg after the show and a 60-year-old shake my hand. It's cool to see people connecting with the music across different generations.

The capacity to suffer varies more than anything that I have observed in human nature.

It's interesting to go places and see that, at the end of the day, people just want to feel safe, and what that looks like to them varies... but that was encouraging to see that there is more common ground than perhaps I realized.

We need to redefine community and find a variety of ways of coming together and helping each other.

I love Octavia Spencer. I love what she has to say as a human, and I love her career and the variety of characters she has played.

I worked a variety of jobs in retail and at coffee shops all through high school. And, though I was surrounded by people who cared about me, part of me ached with every accomplishment, because my parents weren't there to share my joy.

The more we can get together and talk about various perspectives, feelings, beliefs, the better.

What attracted me to Jimmy Bulger were the various facets of his personality and his humanity because I felt that the only way I could approach playing a character like him was to find his human side first and then map that out to see where it took the turn. He was a very complicated man.