Other People's Shoes Quotes & Sayings

We sell books, other people sell shoes. What's the difference? Publishing isn't the highest art. — Michael Korda

I'm romantic. I fall in love every day. Not with people but with situations. The other day, I saw a tramp polishing his shoes. That just gripped my heart. — Amy Winehouse

The old frame house down near the waterfront had never held so many people since the day it was put up. It must have been a pleasant place fifty years before: trees overhanging the limpid water, cows grazing in the meadows on both sides of the river, little frame houses like this one dotting the banks here and there.
It wasn't a pleasant place any more: garbage scows, coal yards, the river a greasy gray soup. Dead-end blocks of decrepit tenements on one side of it, lumberyards and ice-plants and tall stacks on the other.
The house was set far back from the street, hemmed in by the blank walls that rose around it.
("I Wouldn't Be In Your Shoes") — Cornell Woolrich

What I mean by "empathy" is putting yourself in other people's shoes, feeling what they feel. — Paul Bloom

I think that when you put yourself, as actors have to do, in other people's shoes, when you have to put on the costume that someone else has worn in their life, it gets much, much harder to be prejudiced against them and even to be - to not try to look at the world in a sense of "I'm not going to judge somebody. I'm going to try to understand who they are and what they're about." — Kevin Spacey

It would be a mistake, however, to think that Connectors are the only people who matter in a social epidemic. Roger Horchow sent out a dozen faxes promoting his daughter's friend's new restaurant. But he didn't discover that restaurant. Someone else did and told him about it. At some point in the rise of Hush Puppies, the shoes were discovered by Connectors, who broadcast the return of Hush Puppies far and wide. but who told the Connectors about Hush Puppies? It's possible that Connectors learn about new information by an entirely random process, that because they know so many people they get access to new things wherever they pop up. If you look closely at social epidemics, however, it becomes clear that just as there are people we rely upon to connect us to other people, there are also people we rely upon to connect us with new information. There are people specialists, and there are information specialists. — Malcolm Gladwell

What is the empathy deficit? The inability of people to stand in other folks shoes. It's hard to empathize with people who have different values than you — Barack Obama

She imagined what it must be like to have Charlie's mind - to believe that red shoes are faster then other shoes; to believe, as he did, that ducks could drive fire engines and that pigs built houses out of bricks and straw. There were plenty of people who weren't three-and-three-quarters who believed equally implausible things ... and when to war over them. — Alexander McCall Smith

Illustrators are word people who happen to draw. We work with one foot in a book, the other stuck in a paint pot. Our shoes are a disgrace. — Wallace Tripp

I'm very boring. But I'm a bit obsessed with women that are so incredibly solid in their shoes that they don't care what other people think of them. I just think there's something so interesting about that kind of confidence. — Melissa McCarthy

It is well established among us that you may hold up your head in polite society with a public lie in your mouth or other people's money in your pocket or innocent blood on your hands, but not with dishwater on your hands or mud on your shoes. — Wendell Berry

Whatever their conscious motives, these men cannot know why they are as they are. As sickening as I find their behavior, I have to admit that if I were to trade places with one of these men, atom for atom, I would be him: There is no extra part of me that could decide to see the world differently or to resist the impulse to victimize other people. Even if you believe that every human being harbors an immortal soul, the problem of responsibility remains: I cannot take credit for the fact that I do not have the soul of psychopath. If I had truly been in Komisarjevsky's shoes on July 23,2007 - that is, if I had his genes and life experience and identical brain (or soul) in an identical state - I would have acted exactly as he did. There is simply no intellectually respectable position from which to deny this. — Sam Harris

Every morning, when people are getting up in the tent, the babies are crying, people are pushing each other at the taps outside and some children are already pulling the crusts of porridge off the pots we ate from last night, my first-born brother and I clean our shoes. Our grandmother makes us sit on our mats with our legs straight out so she can look carefully at our shoes to make sure we have done it properly. No other children in the tent have real school shoes. When we three look at them it's as if we are in a real house again, with no war, no away. — Nadine Gordimer

You've got to bring the emotion, and you have to understand that you can't touch other people if you're not touched. You can't move other people if you're not moved. So if you're just giving some frickin talk you've memorized over and over again, you're going to have a flat affect. If you've just got a bunch of visuals on the screen that are leading your talk, hang up your shoes and get the hell out of there. — Tony Robbins

I like the idea of people who've had some success in one form secretly wanting to be something else; I have some of that myself. I look for it in other people who've established themselves in some particular art form, and then you find out that they really would like to design running shoes, or edit literary magazines or something. — William Gibson

Right. I look fine. Except I don't,' said Zora, tugging sadly at her man's nightshirt. This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust. To that end she had tried banning television in the early years, and never had a lipstick or a woman's magazine crossed the threshold of the Belsey home to Kiki's knowledge, but these and other precautionary measures had made no difference. It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies
it seeped in with every draught in the house; people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it. — Zadie Smith

And whenever I'm in a situation where I'm wearing the same as 600 other people and doing the same thing as 600 other people, looking back, I always found ways to make myself different, whether it be having a red lining inside of my jacket, having red shoes, it hasn't changed. — Jeremy Irons

It's just that the thing you never understand about being a mother, until you are one, is that it is not the grown man - the galumphing, unshaven, stinking, opinionated off-spring - you see before you, with his parking tickets and unpolished shoes and complicated love life. You see all the people he has ever been all rolled up into one.
I look at him and see the baby I held in my arms, dewing besotted, unable to believe that I'd created another human being. I see the toddler, reaching for my hand, the schoolboy weeping tears of fury after being bullied by some other child. I saw the vulnerabilities, the love, the history. — Jojo Moyes

She wanted two weeks of working among people she didn't know, doing the kind of work a million other people did. She wanted to step into someone else's shoes. She — Patricia Highsmith

A boy got a splinter in his eye, and his heart turned cold. Only two people noticed. One was a witch, and she took him for her own. The other was his best friend. And she went after him in ill-considered shoes, brave and completely unprepared. — Anne Ursu

Little fussy Otto, in his red-lined black opera cloak with pockets for all his gear, his shiny black shoes, his carefully cut widow's peak and, not least, his ridiculous accent that grew thicker or thinner depending on who he was talking to, did not look like a threat. He looked funny, a joke, a music-hall vampire. It had never previously occurred to Vimes that, just possibly, the joke was on other people. — Terry Pratchett

I don't know about other people, but when I wake up in the morning and put my shoes on, I think, Jesus Christ, now what? — Charles Bukowski

Lou, honey, I'll buy you a new pair of shoes if you'll stop flashing your panties at everyone sitting across the room from us. You are wearing panties, right?
I glance up and across at Stefan. His words register a moment later and my head swivels toward the other side of the room. There are a number of people staring at me. One of them is Detective Terry Shay. Or I think it is. He's not looking directly at me. He's looking up my skirt — Ronda Thompson

Now don't run away." "I'm not. I learned to see beyond the soles of these shoes. I learned that behind this wretched life we lead there is a great ideal, a great hope. I learned that each individual life should be guided by that hope and by that ideal. And people who don't feel that must have died before they were born." He smiled and added, "Those aren't my words. It's something I heard someone else say years ago." "In your view ,then, I belong to the group who died before they were born?" "No, you belong to another group, the ones who haven't yet been born." "Aren't you forgetting about all my experience of life?" "Not at all, but experience is only worth anything when it's useful to other people, and you're not useful to anyone. — Jose Saramago

I meet people who can't get healthcare for their families, people who are just distressed over what is happening in our country. So when somebody asks me, "How do you get up?" it really triggered in me the feeling that that's what I want us all to think about each other. How do we get up? How do we pull on our shoes, go out and deal with the problems America faces. That's what I intend to do as president. — Hillary Clinton

When you are starting to fall in love with someone you want to know everything there is to know about them; you want to understand their world and be accepted into it. It is the same for an actor with a new role. — Harriet Walter

Clothing, hair, shoes, accessories: these were props, visual cues, that people used to filter information and make instant assessments out of random connections, to categorize and assign value to those who populated their world. And layered beneath the props for sight came those for smell, and hearing, and more, that sense of intangibility that allowed people to read nuance and body language and interpret what the other senses didn't grasp directly; cues that together formed a picture that matched perceptions based on expectations and that, when adjusted one way or the other, filtered past the gatekeepers of the mind, allowing Munroe to become whatever she needed to be. — Taylor Stevens

Nothing helps us build our perspective more than developing compassion for others. Compassion is a sympathetic feeling. It involves the willingness to put yourself in someone else's shoes, to take the focus off yourself and to imagine what it's like to be in someone else's predicament, and simultaneously, to feel love for that person. It's the recognition that other people's problems, their pain and frustrations, are every bit as real as our own-often far worse. In recognizing this fact and trying to offer some assistance, we open our own hearts and greatly enhance our sense of gratitude. — Richard Carlson

Look, this isn't The Mummy. It's not like a teenaged girl's diary could resurrect the dead or anything. It's just the story of her innocuous life. What on earth could an ancient girl have known that would be worth killing someone over? (Tory) You're asking me that question? People kill each other over a pair of shoes or for wearing the same jacket. (Acheron) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

What did the others give to each other?
Nothingness.
Granger stood looking back with Montag. Everyone must leave something behind
when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a
wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand
touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when
people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The
difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the
touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the
gardener will be there a lifetime. — Ray Bradbury

I love research and being educated. It's a great job being able to step into all kinds of professions and into other people's shoes. — Denzel Washington

People have an annoying tendency to compare shoe prices with the cost of other things. They might say, 'Wow - those shoes cost as much as a sofa!' Well, this may be true, but the comparison is so silly. After all, you can't wear a sofa. — Mimi Pond

It's got to do with putting yourself in other people's shoes and seeing how far you can come to truly understand them. I like the empathy that comes from acting. — Christian Bale

I couldn't give away my husband's shoes. I could give away other things, but the shoes - I don't know what it was about the shoes, but a lot of people have mentioned to me that shoes took on more meaning than we generally think they do ... their attachment to the ground, I don't know - but that did have a real resonance for me. — Joan Didion

I stopped looking at the cars after the first few miles. Once I started to see past the exteriors, I saw what lay inside some of them and felt the urge to sprint to the nearest freeway exit. Some people had tried to outrun The Plague by leaving town. They hadn't realized the illness could still find them in their cars, and now the 405 was one of the largest graveyards in the world. I thought for a moment about all of the other cities across the globe that probably had scenes just like this. My eyes stung, wondering if my mother, my dad, or any of my friends were in similar graveyards.
I made the mistake of glancing into an overturned Volkswagen Beetle as I passed and saw a pair of legs clad in jeans and white Jack Purcell sneakers in the shadows of the car. They reminded me of Sarah's shoes. The man who laced those up that morning hadn't realized he wouldn't be taking them off again. — Kirby Howell

People are eager to walk in other people's pair of shoes that does not fit them. The result is that, their dreams begin to imitate a "tortoise" walk and that I guess is already uncomfortable! — Israelmore Ayivor

Dogs were like the worst drunks - lunging at crotches then pissing over other people's shoes. — Lucy Wood

Whenever I tell people I'm a misanthrope they react as though that's a bad thing, the idiots. I live in London, for God's sake. Have you walked down Oxford Street recently? Misanthropy's the only thing that gets you through it. It's not a personality flaw, it's a skill.
It's nothing to do with sheer numbers. Move me to a remote cottage in the Hebrides and I'd learn to despise the postman, even if he only visited once a year. I can't abide other people, with their stink and their noise and their irritating ringtones. Bill Hicks called the human race 'a virus with shoes', and if you ask me he was being unduly hard on viruses; I'd consider a career in serial killing if the pay wasn't so bad. — Charlie Brooker

when i go to bed i go to bed with the lights on"

Every morning I look up at the moon and I think
You are a kiddie-pool and I will drown in you.
I think about field trips and cold cuts.
I think about dividends and other words
I don't understand. I make five hundred
lunches in advance. I want to be prepared.
I want new shoes. I want them to be waterproof
and unforgettable. I want the kind of resume
that takes home all the prizes and a salary
commensurate with thunderstorms. I want to believe
that there are people in this world
whose lives are the size of houses and their bills
are paid on time and when they see birds in the sky they think
that's a nice thing to see. In my free time I clip coupons
and put them in my wallet where I forget
to redeem them and this gnaws at me
day in and day out and when I close my eyes
I can feel my heart and it is trembling. — Sasha Fletcher

We make decisions every day about what we're going to eat. And some people want to buy Nike shoes - two pairs, and other people want to eat Bronx grapes and nourish themselves. I pay a little extra, but this is what I want to do. — Alice Waters

In order to succeed he must remain true to the feeling that had inspired him in the first place. It didn't matter that other people would do it in a different way; in fact this was inevitable. He would keep to the roads because, despite the odd fast car, he felt safer there. It didn't matter that he had no mobile phone. It didn't matter that he had not planned his route, or brought a road map. He had a different map, and that was the one in his mind, made up of all the people and places he had passed. He would also stick to his yachting shoes because, despite the wear and tear, they were his. He saw that when a person becomes estranged from the things they know, and is a passerby, strange things take on a new significance. And knowing this, it seemed important to allow himself to be true to the instincts that made him Harold, as opposed to anyone else. — Rachel Joyce

To be a good citizen, it's important to be able to put yourself in other people's shoes and see the big picture. If everything you see is rooted in your own identity, that becomes difficult or impossible. — Eli Pariser

I'm the worst critic about music myself. I hardly ever, every like something the first time I listen to it. So I've got to put myself in other people's shoes. — Marc Martel

You have to realise that I am the third out of six children, and I am raised with very strong core values and a very strong upbringing. I always put myself in other people's shoes. — Angela Ahrendts

Why me?' he said. 'That's how all men answer. And all men have a knot on their shoes, something they don't know how to do; an inability that binds them to others. Society depends on this asymmetry between people these days: a dovetailing of skills and competence. But the Flood? If the Flood came and one needed a Noah? Not so much a just man as a man able to bring along the few things it would take to start again. You see, you don't know how to tie your shoes, somebody else doesn't know how to plane wood, someone else again has never read Tolstoy, someone else doesn't know how to sow grain and so on. I've been looking for him for years, and, believe me, it's hard, really hard; it seems people have to hold each other by the hand like the blind man and the lame who can't go anywhere without each other, but argue just the same. It means if the Flood comes we'll all die together. — Italo Calvino

In other parts of the world where I go, people are worried about, Jeez, you know, I really wanted to buy my kids shoes this year. — Chris Kilham

We studied a mosque, and this is when we were at Notre Dame, and in this mosque they had people from a variety of countries, most of them immigrants. In some of the countries, when you go into a mosque you remove your shoes. To not do so could be punishable even by death in that nation. In other countries, it would be a great offense to remove their shoes when they come into the mosque, a sign of disrespect. — Michael Emerson

The grass is always greener. You think how wonderful it would be to be someone else, but I don't think I would like it. I'm thrilled to observe other people, but I don't want to be in their shoes. If I got there, I might find it not quite what I expected, and it would break my illusion, and I don't want that! — Marti Webb

The boy was smaller than Bruno and was sitting on the ground with a forlorn expression. He wore the same striped pajamas that all the other people on that side of the fence wore, and a striped cloth cap on his head. He wasn't wearing any shoes or socks and his feet were rather dirty. On his arm he wore an armband with a star on it. — John Boyne

I can't jump into other people's shoes, I can only speak for me. My songs are pretty much sermons put to music. — Mike Willis

Devin was the most gorgeous, unique creature Kate had ever known. She'd come out of the womb an individual, refusing to be defined by anyone. She didn't even look like anyone on either side of their families. Matt's family was so proud of their dark hair, a blue-black that had been the envy of generations, the way it caught the sun like a spiderweb. From Kate's own side of the family, there was a gene that made their eyes so green that they could trick people into thinking that even the most unattractive Morris woman was pretty. And yet here was Devin, with fine cotton-yellow hair and light blue eyes, the left of which was a lazy eye. She'd had to wear an eye patch when she was three. And she'd loved it. She loved her knotted yellow hair. She loved wearing stripes with polka dots, and tutus, and pink and green socks with orange patent-leather shoes. Devin could care less what other people thought about her. — Sarah Addison Allen

People who expect to feel guilty tend to be more sympathetic, to put themselves into other people's shoes, to think about the consequences of their behaviour before acting, and to treasure their morals. As a result they are less prone to lie, cheat or behave immorally when they conduct a business deal or spot an opportunity to make money, studies suggest. They are also likely to make better employees because people who think less about the future results of their actions are more likely to be late, to steal or to be rude to clients. — David D. Burns

Jobs, as such, are a relatively new concept. People may have always worked, but until the advent of the corporation in the early Renaissance, most people just worked for themselves. They made shoes, plucked chickens, or created value in some way for other people, who then traded or paid for those goods and services. — Douglas Rushkoff

I've asked myself that a thousand times over and I'm no closer to an answer now than I was when it began. I think that's why I always loved movies so much. In a movie, everything has to make sense. The characters always have to have motivation. Good, solid motivation for everything they do. They can't be a dickhead without reason. If someone turns on a character, they have to have a hardcore, believable reason for it. Unfortunately, in real life you don't. People turn on each other for anything from catching a constipated look on your face when you had gas and thinking it was directed at them, to not liking the brand of shoes you're wearing. People are sick. (Aiden) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Boom Boom, for instance, was an excellent outside-the-box thinker. Asa thought Boom Boom was a great strategist, and brilliant. The problem with Boom Boom is that he's kind of a creep. He had attracted the Academy's scouts when he built a bomb and blew up a bank. The feat had required certain mental abilities, but it also showed a deficit in others. Anyone who commits an act like that has issues with mentally putting themselves in other people's shoes. Boom Boom had also killed his childhood dog. Knowing these things made Asa uncomfortable around his former teammate. — Chad Leito

The craziest thing about fashion people in general, not just designers, is that it's always, "Oh my God, you lost weight! I love your hair!" Or "Oh, you're so tan!" Or, "You're so skinny! I love your shoes!" These are fashion icebreakers. Everyone's always looking at each other. — Michael Kors

Sometimes you have to put yourself in other people's shoes to really understand the hardships of their souls. — Kellie Elmore

So I'm back again to the eternal question, the one that has plagued me all my life: How Do Other People Do It? How come they were given life's rule book and I missed out? Where was I when God was dispensing capability and cop on? Looking at shoes, probably. — Marian Keyes

I did not think I had what it took to be an actor, because most of the actors that I encountered were people who were very narcissistic and I thought since I lacked narcissism to become an actor because that's what it took. It was more of a social experiment for me to walk in the shoes of other people that I found interesting. — Michael Jai White

Secrets are inherently selfish. The longer you keep them, the harder it is to put yourself in other people's shoes about them and the more irrational your thinking surrounding it becomes. — James Scott

The airport in Sofia was a tiny place; I'd expected a palace of modern communism, but we descended to a modest area of tarmac and strolled across it with the other travelers. Nearly all of them were Bulgarian,
I decided, trying to catch something of their conversations. They were
handsome people, some of them strikingly so, and their faces varied
from the dark-eyed pale Slav to a Middle-Eastern bronze, a kaleidoscope
of rich hues and shaggy black eyebrows, noses long and flaring, or
aquiline, or deeply hooked, young women with curly black hair and noble
foreheads, and energetic old men with few teeth. They smiled or laughed and talked eagerly with one another; one tall man gesticulated to his companion with a folded newspaper. Their clothes were distinctly not Western, although I would have been hard put to say what it was about the cuts of suits and skirts, the heavy shoes and dark hats, that was unfamiliar to me. — Elizabeth Kostova

Dear God,
Reveal to me through stories something of what it is like to walk around in someone else's shoes.
Show me something about myself in the stories I read, something that needs changing, a thought, a feeling or attitude.
Deliver me from myself, O God, and from the parachial and sometimes prejudiced views I have of other people, other nations, other races, other religions.
Enlarge by heart with a story, and change me by the characters I meet there.
May some of the light from their lives spill over into mine, giving me illumination where there was once ignorance, compassion where there was once contempt. — Ken Gire