When you connect to someone on a human level, and you get to know about them, you can begin to love the things that make them different. That's when fear dissipates, and that's when we can live the life that we're all supposed to be living.
Interpretation
Connecting with others humanizes them and fosters love for their uniqueness, reducing fear.
This quote emphasizes the importance of establishing human connections in order to appreciate and love the differences that make each individual unique. By moving beyond superficial judgments and engaging with others on a deeper level, fear diminishes and opportunities for authentic living arise, allowing us to embrace a richer and more fulfilling life together.
In practice
During a motivational speech about the importance of empathy and understanding.
When I was a kid in Ireland, there were not very many black people. I was very much like the strange brown thing, intriguing and cute. I didn't experience racism there. The first time I did was in London. It was that moment that you realize you're black. A kind of lifting of the veil.
What I have wanted to do is take roles that are unexpected for people who look like me. Roles that the establishment would say, 'Oh, she couldn't possibly be that.'
I don't know why women aren't allowed to have the same sort of breadth and scope and flaws of men.
I don't like the term 'colour-blind' - because I don't want people to be blind to my colour.
Mackenzie, you cannot produce trust, just as you cannot 'do' humility. It either is or is not. Trust is the fruit of a relationship in which you know you are loved. Because you do not know that I love you, you cannot trust me.
All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm's way.
I don't think it's necessarily healthy to go into relationships as a needy person. Better to go in with a full deck.
Not what we give, but what we share, for the gift without the giver is bare.
Funny business, a woman's career: the things you drop on the way up the ladder so you can move faster. You forget you'll need them again when you get back to being a woman. It's one career all females have in common, whether we like it or not: being a woman. Sooner or later, we've got to work at it, no matter how many other careers we've had or wanted.
To be shocked at how deeply rejection hurts is to ignore what acceptance involves. We must never allow our suffering to be compounded by suggestions that there is something odd in suffering so deeply. There would be something amiss if we didn't.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.