Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
John SteinbeckRead
Try to understand men. If you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love.
Interpretation
Understanding others leads to kindness and love, reducing feelings of hate.
This quote by John Steinbeck emphasizes the importance of understanding one another in human relationships. By gaining insight into each other's experiences and emotions, individuals are more likely to cultivate kindness and love, as empathy fosters deeper connections and mitigates feelings of animosity.
In practice
In a speech about community building, one might use this quote to illustrate the importance of empathy.
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
At one point, as Samuel urges Adam to raise his boys well regardless of the blood that might be in them, Adam tells him, "You can't make a race horse of a pig." Samuel replies, "No, but you can make a very fast pig.
And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips. No man had touched the seed, or lusted for the growth. Men ate what they had not raised, had no connection with the bread. The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not loved or hated, it had no prayers or curses.
The comfortable people in tight houses felt pity at first, and then distaste, and finally hatred for the migrant people.
People do not want advice - they want corroboration.
It is one of the triumphs of the human that he can know a thing and still not believe it.
Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.
Being known as a writer did change the relationships I had with directors. The rap on actors is that they always want to inflate their parts. But when directors know you write screenplays and have a different view of things, you really get invited into the huddle in a much fuller way. And those collaborations end in friendships.
One of life's terrible truths is that women like guys who seem to know what they're doing.
I always knew I had a relationship with God. But I wasn't sure God had a relationship with me.
The thing that's between us is fascination, and the fascination resides in our being alike. Whether you're a man or a woman, the fascination resides in finding out that we're alike.
To be humble to superiors is a duty, to equals courtesy, to inferiors nobleness.
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