Quotes About Empathy

Really, the audience's objective is to exercise their emotions when they're watching. They want to lean in and care.

I've spent my whole life watching straight couples and I still learned about love. It doesn't necessarily matter who's playing the part.

I love watching people tell stories, because it's very vulnerable.

Keeping one's eyes open, listening, watching, being quiet, adopting some of the techniques of the psychoanalyst in talking to people, will bring you that surface from which something more comes.

The first time I was on 'Johnny Carson,' I remember being so scared, but the minute he started talking to me, I felt a little more comfortable because I just knew he was going to take care of me. Hopefully, I have learned something from watching him for so many years that I can offer that to a guest.

I will never regret being there for my children, watching them, making sure they'll be okay. But I might regret not being there for them.

Empathy is what obsesses me. And watching empathy recede in the world is terrifying.

If I see a movie on TV that I'm in, I usually will watch it for that reason: It's like I'm watching another person.

I like being able to play women that are growing or aren't easy to love. Maybe they are really likable, but they're annoying because they're not tapping into who they're suppose to be. You're watching them, and you're like, 'Oh, why does she keep making this decision?'

Sometimes when I'm watching television and something, an image, will come on that has to do with 9/11 or some of these families telling their stories, or children talking about drawing pictures of airplanes flying into towers, you know, I find myself still choking up.

I find that you learn from others. It's very much about watching TV and watching movies for me and grasping that way and watching other people act.

As soon as you think you know someone else's truth better than they do, you are in deep water.

Not one child should be denied food nor water. Not one child should suffer.

When someone is bothered by someone claiming lack of drinking water, lack of medicine for the sick, and lack of food for the hungry, that person has problems too deep to be explained in an interview.

We don't want to end up in a class war. We want everyone to have food, clean water, and a long life expectancy.

With imagery, as actors know, you can make up anything you want to. You can put yourself in icy water to get rid of this or that.

When you're on top and you lead the parade, everyone's there throwing lilies and lilac water on your head. But when those parades have gone by and there's a storm in your heart, there are very few people that are going to sit there and listen to you bemoan life.

As social beings we live with our eyes upon our reflection, but have no assurance of the tranquillity of the waters in which we see it.

If I want to be a loving, generous, giving person, I'm not going to test the waters. I'm simply going to be a loving, generous, giving person.

My brother John loved Big Bill Broonzy, and from that, Angus and I discovered Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy. We could relate to what they were singing about. When a family uproots itself and moves to the other side of the world because your dad couldn't get a job, you didn't feel part of the system, if there even was a system.

Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.

I did not want to be a tree, a flower or a wave. In a dancer's body, we as audience must see ourselves, not the imitated behavior of everyday actions, not the phenomenon of nature, not exotic creatures from another planet, but something of the miracle that is a human being.

What is essential - the one thing that could stop us being coarsened to other lives - is that we feel a great, living wave of animal life all around us, covering the earth.

When you're onstage, you're acutely aware of the reaction of a particular group of people, because it's like a wave.