I love helping other people. When I made a commitment to stay in the South, to work for change, it meant devoting my life to working for and helping others. I feel good when I know that I've saved someone's farm, or helped a family to get a home or access to credit. Or when I can get young people to see that there's more to life than just trying to make the biggest dollar for yourself.
Helping others is perhaps the greatest joy! You cannot have a perfect day without helping others with no thought of getting something in return.
I taught myself German and psychology. Learning about psychology really helped me understand myself and the others around me and it helped keep me sane.
To understand suffering, you must go beyond pain and pleasure. Your own desires and fears prevent you from understanding and thereby helping others. In reality there are no others, and by helping yourself you help everybody else. If you are serious about the suffering of mankind, you must perfect the only means of help you have, yourself.
Acting helped me as I was growing up. It helped me learn about myself, helped me travel, helped me understand life, express myself, all those wonderful things. So I'm very, very grateful; it's a fun job. It's a luxury.
The summer gig turned into my day job. I was an arts administrator who helped make indie flicks. At the filmmakers' encouragement, I tried shooting a couple of shorts of my own. Directing was stressful, it was not my strength. But writing the scripts and helping others with their scripts - that was a gas. Making stuff up the way I wanted to see it was the biggest kick I ever experienced.
Being diagnosed with cancer helped me identify all that was wrong in my life. It also helped me search for the solutions. I discovered self-love; I learned to prioritise myself over others and, most importantly, realised that I had to love myself first before somebody else loves me.
I don't think being a musician makes me a role model at all. But I do believe that I have responsibility to offer people a helping hand when and if I can, just the same way that others have helped me. I think that it's important to keep that cycle going, and to give back to whatever your personal definition of community is.
I find that the critics of voluntary service are all too often those who are prepared to accept such services when they require them but deride them with cynicism and scepticism when they see others helping and being helped.
Helping others entails learning how you are helped. In order to heal others, you must learn to heal yourself. Learning how to give to yourself is part of learning how to give to others. If you are stingy with yourself, you will be stingy with others. When you understand how everything is given to you, you will be able to give everything to others.
What the Internet has done is made it easier to stay in touch with people, and social networking has helped me career-wise by helping me keep in touch with my fans.
If the knowledge of torture of others makes you sick, it is a case of sympathy... It can be argued that behaviour based on sympathy is in an important sense egoistic, for one is oneself pleased at others' pleasure and pained at others' pain, and the pursuit of one's own utility may thus be helped by sympathetic action.
As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands, one for helping yourself, the other for helping others.
No member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who has canned peas, topped beets, hauled hay, shoveled coal, or helped in any way to serve others ever forgets or regrets the experience of helping provide for those in need.
By helping others, we make ourselves better, and by helping others heal, we heal ourselves. I think we can do that on an individual level and a worldwide level. I hope people have a chance to give that a little bit of thought.
I started to read James Baldwin very early on in my life. At a time, as a young adult in the Sixties, when there were not that many authors in whom I could recognize myself, he was an important guide and mentor to me as he was to many others. He helped me understand who I was and decipher the world around me. He gave me the words to defend myself and the argumentative rhetoric to master discussions with others.