Empathy Quotes by Rumi, Archie Manning, Yann Martel, Lucille Ball, Keanu Reeves, Jane Addams and many others.
I can sense your presence in my Heart although you belong to all the world.
I have a lot of empathy for quarterbacks.
If literature does one thing, it makes you more empathetic by making you live other lives and feel the pain of others. Ideologues don’t feel the pain of others because they haven’t imaginatively got under their skins.
There’s a great deal of difference between temperament and temper. Temperament is something you welcome creatively, for it is based on sensitivity, empathy, awareness … but a bad temper takes too much out of you and doesn’t really accomplish anything.
The simple act of paying attention can take you a long way.
That person is most cultivated who is able to put himself in the place of the greatest number of other persons.
None of my clients are criminals, but to a much lighter degree that’s what goes on. I hear the story, and I hear it with the level of detail that breeds empathy.
Wouldn`t it be wonderful if we could all be a little more gentle with each other, and a little more loving, have a little more empathy, and maybe we’d like each other a little bit more.
Empathy may be the single most important quality that must be nurtured to give peace a fighting chance.
If your moon sign is in Leo, you have a lot of empathy for Leos. You empathize with their approach and their aims and their aura.
There’s something in everyone only they know.
As long as our people, youth, businesses and individuals engage the issues of the day civilly in our democracy, and treat their fellow Singaporeans and foreigners within our midst with dignity and empathy, and endeavor for a more caring society, the best years of Singapore, a Singapore for all, are ahead of us.
Empathy makes you more aware of other people’s suffering, but it’s not clear it actually motivates you to take moral action or prevents you from taking immoral action.
We admire elephants in part because they demonstrate what we consider the finest human traits: empathy, self-awareness, and social intelligence. But the way we treat them puts on display the very worst of human behavior.
Often, instead of offering empathy, we have a strong urge to give advice or reassurance and to explain our own position or feeling.
I hope you don’t listen to this. I hope you choose to broaden, and not contract, your ambit of concern.
When a friend speaks to me, whatever he says is interesting.
In the Communist period, the revolutionaries, the leaders were almost always – Che Guevara, people like that – they were always from the middle class and the educated. And empathy is a very powerful emotion.
All around you are people whose lives are filled with trouble and sorrow, and they need your compassion and encouragement.
Man wishes to be confirmed in his being by man, and wishes to have a presence in the being of the other…. Secretly and bashfully he watches for a YES which allows him to be and which can come to him only from one human person to another.
When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.
I’m determined to disagree with people without being disagreeable. That’s part of the empathy. Empathy doesn’t just extend to cute little kids. You have to have empathy when you’re talking to some guy who doesn’t like black people.
Empathy is like a universal solvent. Any problem immersed in empathy becomes soluble.
Our goal is to create a quality of empathic connection that allows everyone’s needs to be met.
Sometimes, in Silicon Valley, there is this attitude that we know best and we can change the world. The boldness allows us to invent the future. But, we need more empathy for those who are left behind and a recognition that Silicon Valley can’t just call the shots and expect change.
In a democracy, a man who does not listen cannot lead.
Simple inattention kills empathy, let alone compassion. So the first step in compassion is to notice the other’s need. It all begins with the simple act of attention.
When you listen with empathy to another person, you give that person psychological air.
Because I came into fame so early on, I’ve never done that. I don’t investigate through the Internet about people who I know in the same way that I think most people do because I know what that’s like to be on the other end of it. I think it gave me a certain kind of discipline, or empathy.
Because a human being is endowed with empathy, he violates the natural order if he does not reach out to those who need care. Responding to this empathy, one is in harmony with the order of things, with dharma; otherwise, one is not.
There are justifiable case-by-case situations wherein an educator might exhibit targeted sensitivity to a student’s unique circumstances. This is humane and laudable. In most instances though, trigger warnings are not a manifestation of justified empathy but are symptomatic of an ailing culture.
What we call politics now and what most political writers write about is the empathy and the bonding and the word choice and the horse rights, and it has nothing to do with what’s really happening to people’s lives.
Singing with others is an unmediated, shared experience as each person feels the same music reverberating in their individual bodies. Singing is part of our humanity; it is embodied empathy.
Cinema connects people: they respond as a group, you feel you are not alone, and you see you are not alone. Capitalism is destroying this social aspect of films, and even empathy, by creating the illusion that you are more important than the next person: ‘You will buy this because you are special.’ That is horrible.
I hope people learn the power of vulnerability through my songs. I think vulnerability can save the world. Empathy helps people connect with each other.
George Saunders is the funniest. He makes me laugh in the way I want to laugh – with so much empathy and deep understanding of people. He illuminates things and people I’ve never thought about – and I’ve dedicated my life to the study of people and their idiosyncrasies. He is light years ahead.
If we become skilled in giving ourselves empathy, we often experience in just a few seconds a natural release of energy which then enables us to be present with the other person. If this fails to happen, however, we have a couple of other choices.
I look for a role that hopefully I feel empathy with and that I can understand and love, but also that has that challenge for me to play – a different kind of role, a different type of character, a different time period.
Many people today in the developed countries are so far removed from poverty and suffering and starvation that they lack empathy for the sufferings of others.
We don’t want to blame the victim. The civil rights movement had a profound effect on the United States and on the American mind, maybe unique in the world. Once we realized how victimized people of color had been, an honest empathy went out and that’s how we got civil rights legislation.
To embrace suffering culminates in greater empathy, the capacity to feel what it is like for the other to suffer, which is the ground for unsentimental compassion and love.
I have tremendous empathy for people who are faced with any kind of a chronic problem. Sometimes when we’re in this situation, it’s as though our mind has us believe that if we ruminate about the pain we’ll find a way out.
Shame derives its power from being unspeakable…If we speak shame, it begins to wither. Just the way exposure to light was deadly for the gremlins, language and story bring light to shame and destroy it.
Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren’t always comfortable, but they’re never weakness.
Trump’s lying, his self-regard, his self-soothing, his lack of empathy, his narcissistic rage, his contempt for norms, rules, laws, facts and simple truths – have all come home to roost.
Empathy is not as complicated when you have some aspects in common with your character; it’s not impossible to know someone who’s like you in many ways but different in one. This is true especially if you are a reader. Reading makes you accustomed to inhabiting other lives and sensibilities.
That’s where peace begins – not just in the plans of leaders, but in the hearts of people. Not just in some carefully designed process, but in the daily connections – that sense of empathy that takes place among those who live together in this land and in this sacred city of Jerusalem.
Lemberger’s stories are marvelous compounds of scholarship, imagination and empathy. Brought to life with rich historical detail, these biblical women, sidelined and silenced for centuries, prove to be audacious, utterly relatable, and spellbinding companions.
Democrats have long held an advantage over Republicans on health care, mostly due to a perceived empathy problem in my party.
I learned a lot of empathy and openness from my parents. I know so many people who don’t have that experience.
Empathy before education.
Movies are like a machine that generates empathy.
Only an intervention by women around the world, with their innate knowledge of interdependency, deep listening, empathy and self-sacrifice, could possibly alter our species’ desperate course.
Without exception, empathy is always appropriate.
Empathy is really important.. Only when our clever brain and our human heart work together in harmony can we achieve our full potential.
Empathizing with someone’s ‘no’ protects us from taking it personally.
You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.
The empathy I found reading ‘Heidi’ and ‘Little Women’ is empathy we have as human beings that can feed all of our souls. We have our differences, but we’re all so similar in our humanness. So those stories about young girls overcoming meant a lot to me and gave me hope.
If something doesnt feel normal to me, it must be wrong. Failing to have a shred of imaginative empathy is a virtue!
Thanksgiving dinner’s sad and thankless. Christmas dinner’s dark and blue. When you stop and try to see it From the turkey’s point of view.
My knowledge of myself is direct, synthetic, from within outwards; my knowledge of other persons is indirect, analytical, from outside inwards. My knowledge of myself starts at the core; that of others at the crust.
Our culture has accepted two huge lies. The first is that if you disagree with someone’s lifestyle, you must fear or hate them. The second is that to love someone means you agree with everything they believe or do. Both are nonsense. You don’t have to compromise convictions to be compassionate.
I grew up with a lot of compassion and empathy. I notice when I meet other friends of mine that were raised Christian sometimes we have similar model of sensitivity, whether to our advantage or disadvantage.
There is zero correlation between IQ and emotional empathy… They’re controlled by different parts of the brain.
Tragically, one of the rarest commodities in our culture is empathy. People are hungry for empathy, They don’t know how to ask for it.
Use your imaginations, and use your empathy. If you don’t do that, you’re limiting yourself as an artist, and you’re hurting the world.
True compassion comes from free will by drawing empathy from within.
I don’t know if it is a spiritual, physiological or psychological phenomenon, but I believe now more than ever that singing is a universal, built-in mechanism designed to cultivate empathy and compassion.
Writing is transcendental. It is a form of expression, a form of art that you can take anywhere. That you can do anywhere. It poses the deepest questions in the universe. It generates emotion. It elicits empathy, promotes learning, creates an intellect you simply cannot get from any other medium. For me, it is air.
I call him religious who understands the suffering of others.
Learning to stand in somebody else’s shoes, to see through their eyes, that’s how peace begins. And it’s up to you to make that happen. Empathy is a quality of character that can change the world.
Empathy is a skill like any other human skill – and if you get a chance to practice, you can get better at it.
Empathy requires something extremely difficult: accepting the fact that we are not and never will be in the other person’s shoes. There’s no rational, universal course because individuals have different goals, different worldviews and different experiences.
Chris Guest has his own form. It’s a way of working that is really intense, and you can commit a lot, and you focus a lot. You get to bring a lot. You get to bring things maybe you haven’t seen before. You’re asked to care a great deal for these people who you’re playing and create heart and empathy.
They’re all qualities wrongly called feminine: attention to detail, patience, empathy. I don’t have children, but I was raised as a female to have those qualities because they’re perceived as feminine. Until men are raised with those qualities, too, they won’t have the full circle of human qualities.
My heart goes out to him. Sort of. Because empathy depends on how you’ve spent your day.
You can’t have empathy for somebody that’s gone through something you haven’t – because, definitionally, you can’t. But you can feel for them and have sympathy for them. And that’s what this country needs to practice more. It’s about realizing that you do come from a different place.
The great leaders that I have worked with are people who have a good sense of empathy with other people. They can walk a factory floor, or walk through a battalion and smell if there’s something wrong.
At a person-to-person level, I think that there’s always something to be said for having some empathy for the folks who really, really disagree with you about a given topic.
If I had to name my superpower, it’s probably empathy.
There were some advantages to being a woman photographer. I think women have more empathy with the subject.
I’m still learning about music. The best way to learn is to listen to the audience. When you listen to the audience, they will tell you what they like. I wish these big corporations, instead of telling the audience what they should have, would listen.
NVC enhances inner communication by helping us translate negative internal messages into feelings and needs. Our ability to distinguish our own feelings and needs and to empathize with them can free us from depression.
I coach to help boys become men of empathy and integrity who will lead, be responsible, and change the world for good.
Empathy fuels connection; sympathy drives disconnection.
I think empathy is undervalued in a lot of these comedy writers’ rooms.
Obama often criticizes policies that place the interests of the powerful ahead of the powerless. But through his administration’s support of abortion rights, Obama shows his lack of empathy for society’s most powerless.
I have great empathy for all the contestants that come on ‘Top Chef,’ whether they go home right away or they make it to the finish line. It’s a very vulnerable position they put themselves in and I feel for them.
I believe empathy is the most essential quality of civilization.
By maintaining our attention on what’s going on within others, we offer them a chance to fully explore and express their interior selves. We would stem this flow if we were to shift attention too quickly either to their request or to our own desire to express ourselves.
As you get older you have more respect and empathy for your parents. Now I have a great relationship with both of them.
Listen, that you may live.
As an artist I am attracted by decadence, by those who exhaust their lives in the shallow pursuits of pleasure. Occasionally, I feel that spiritually I participate in all these kinds of lives.
I believe in empathy. When religion provides that for people, it’s the best thing in the world.
I’m less interested in slasher, and go more for roles that can affect you on a personal level. I’m interested in human empathy in the movies I see, and in the ones I am a part of.
It doesn’t hurt to show some empathy.
Empathy is forgetting oneself in the joys and sorrows of another, so much so that you actually feel that the joy or sorrow experienced by another is your own joy and sorrow. Empathy involves complete identification with another.
What’s so exciting and terrifying about the writing process is that it really is an act of exploration and discovery. With all of us, not just writers, there is a sort of knowledge of the other. We have a lot more in common than we realize, and I think writing is really a sustained act of empathy.
Most actors will tell you this – I don’t really know how to connect, empathize with, or make worthy of any revelation a character that doesn’t have love in there somewhere, that doesn’t have an idealism or an empathy in there somewhere.
Empathy should not be contingent on our proximity to suffering or the likelihood of it happening to us. Rather, it should stem from a disdain that suffering is happening at all.
The Torah is the foundational text for Jewish law, but the Haggadah is our book of living memory. We are not merely telling a story here. We are being called to a radical act of empathy. Here we are, embarking on an ancient, perennial attempt to give human lives – our lives – dignity.
Empathy is why entertainment is always growing, and for millennials, everyone is judging them and trying to grab their attention by insulting them. We’re living in a time where everyone has 25 profiles, and they’re having 25 conversations.
If you read with empathy what Lincoln went through, then you realize what you’re going through is nothing compared to what he went through.
Empathy is at the core of family stability and love. I’ve never had a couple come to me and say, I want a divorce; my partner understands me.
The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself.
Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.
If the earth does grow inhospitable toward human presence, it is primarily because we have lost our sense of courtesy toward the earth and its inhabitants.
Every single human civilization has failed over time, and my belief is that it’s due to a lack of rational empathy, of understanding that if you don’t have equality in your society, the conflicts you breed (whether internally or externally) will eventually cause its collapse.
When you see around you the human form suffering or dissolving, you have empathy on the human level. You share the suffering because it has to do with the fleetingness of form. But if that is the only level that operates in you, you haven’t gone beyond suffering.
You have to have some connection, empathy, or chemistry with the person you’re playing and playing with.
Writing fiction is an act of imaginative empathy.
When a friend needs consoling, do not give in to the temptation of telling stories similar to theirs of disaster or bereavement. It is something people often do to show empathy but nothing is more tiresome than other people’s problems when you want to focus on your own. Listening is by far the best form of consolation.
For me, being a top coach means more than just teaching football. That includes empathy, it means that you can speak to a group, that you can deal with the media – you have to be able to do all of that. I would not describe myself as blind in this regard, but a top coach also includes titles.
As a boy, I used to look at reproductions of Rembrandt’s portraits… the people in his paintings were so real I felt I knew them… It is his empathy for the sitter, combined with his enjoyment and dexerity in handling paint that captured my imagination then, and is what I am striving for still.
I would hope that people might view their fellow beings, all beings, with more empathy, more compassion, with a desire to understand. Even if they can’t know why people are the way they are, to understand that they’re probably that way for a good reason.
The success of the abolitionist movement lay in its making real for people in Britain and America the slave ship’s pervasive and utterly instrumental terror, which was indeed its defining feature.
I remember, once I was stressed, with an upcoming paper deadline. That little Microsoft Word clippy guy would show up in my face, jumping around and asking if I needed help. It had no understanding of my emotions and had zero empathy. That got me interested in this idea of tech being responsive to our emotions.
Jealousy knows neither morality nor empathy.
When I read stories of suffering, I still feel something. It seems inhuman not to. At the same time, I’m more aware than ever of how little my feeling is worth, of how – if we are to truly keep alive the conditions that make ethical life possible – it is not empathy that’s needed but insight, organization, and action.
If you have empathy for both sides, then that’s the same as having no empathy at all.
Our culture encourages women to nurture men, making it predictable that many experience a seductive empathy for abusive men, as well as the misguided hope that love can obliterate an ugly past.
Michigan has always been a swing state, so we understand that the goal is to have two political parties, debating the issues with empathy and respect.
I believe one of the requirements of good leadership is the ability to listen – really listen – to those in your organization. An effective leader is very good at listening, and it’s difficult to listen when you are talking.
A prerequisite to empathy is simply paying attention to the person in pain.
We all must support the arts, as it is our culture. It makes us better people. It makes us happy; it gives us empathy and shows us how to live. It is so important.
A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out.
The greater good is achieved by not only telling people what they need to know, but also filling them with a sense of empathy and love.
I really, really do believe that the future of being successful in work is going to be about embracing all of those wonderful things women bring – empathy, collaboration, flexibility – all those wonderful feminine traits we’ve suppressed for too long.
Just to get the basic fundamentals and empathy – I think that’s the most important thing to bring to it if you’ve acted in the past and are now a director: the empathy.
I realized I had written maybe, I dunno, the first ever asexual love song. Where it’s really just about a fear of dying alone – you need contact, you need love, you need empathy. You need this relationship but if there’s no sex involved, people act like it’s not a legitimate relationship.
It can be very dangerous to see things from somebody else’s point of view without the proper training.
A sense of belonging is a sine qua non of healthy psychological functioning everywhere. Such a sense, beginning in infancy and continuing throughout life, comes about by experiencing mutual empathy; by sensing oneself as part of a whole, which recognizes and accepts that one is a member.
If we accept ourselves as animals, and have empathy and tolerance, compassion to others, understand that humans are territorial, aggressive and have gender aspects, then we can change things.
In order to have understanding, you need forgiveness, compassion, and empathy.
When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.
You need to be empathetic in your own personal life and we help our neighbors and our friends out who are struggling in our neighborhoods. But we don’t make bad decisions based on empathy.
Trust is a product of vulnerability that grows over time and requires work, attention, and full engagement.
Everybody wants a robot that will do psychotherapy. But If you don’t have empathy, you don’t have psychotherapy. The robot doesn’t know about life.
A place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller’s art, and then a way of traveling from here to there.
It’s dangerous to think of yourself as a hero and someone else as a villain. It gets in the way of empathy.
I think people perceive my creatures as absurd because they look different, but at the same time, they are a little bit familiar. I want people to feel a kind of empathy with them. When you think about it, all nature is kind of strange looking.. in fact, I’m a strange a looking creature.
I also grew to love Nancy Reagan in a certain way. I learned more – certainly I learned more bad stuff that I had known about in greater detail, but I also got a lot of empathy.
We’ve had Obama for eight years, who, to me, is a model of integrity, sensitivity, empathy. He’s wise, he’s patient, he maintains his composure, and I would have voted for him again.
I want the audience, when they leave, to think of the characters on the stage in three dimensions. I want them to have empathy. I also want them to think about engaging more with where we are culturally.
I felt the kind of desperation, I think, that cancels the possibility of empathy…that makes you unkind.
…man can no more survive psychologically in a psychological milieu that does not respond empathetically to him, than he can survive physically in an atmosphere that contains no oxygen.
Empathy is not a betrayal of one’s cause.
As an actor, I function from a place of compassion and empathy – you have to believe 100 percent what your character is doing, because otherwise it will look like it’s not real.
You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself.
Making a movie is about following characters and embarking on an adventure with them, seeing their reactions, and seeing what they do, having empathy for those characters, feeling for those characters, embarking on this adventure.
My powers of empathy, my ability to reach into another’s heart, cannot penetrate the blank stares of those who would murder innocents with abstract, serene satisfaction.
Empathy as a complex emotion is different. It requires awareness of the other person’s feelings and of one’s own reactions. The appropriate reaction may not be to cry when another person cries, but to reassure them, or even to leave them alone.
I don’t mean to criticize anyone in any way that I wouldn’t criticize myself. I think people should have fun, and have a good time, and enjoy the luck that we have to be lazy and dwell in consumerism. But I think that it’s a balance. And our job as actors is empathy.
…the core values that underpin sustainable development – interdependence, empathy, equity, personal responsibility and intergenerational justice – are the only foundation upon which any viable vision of a better world can possibly be constructed
Some of the most common pitfalls I see occur when authors don’t check their privilege. Billions are living in a personal apocalypse right this second, so a little research and empathy can go a long way toward developing a convincing world.
Mirror neurons make human empathy possible.
There is no greater intelligence than kindness and empathy.
The Kind Foundation was created to scale our social impact and be able to deepen our focus on fostering empathy and developing kinder communities.
Writing a book is very personal. It’s a very personal relationship. A book will start with something as simple as two men talking about work. That gets the fire going. Sustaining that fire is the hard work. It takes attention and empathy to hone the characters.
I think entrepreneurs really appreciate directness and honesty, coupled with empathy.
The hearing that is only in the ears is one thing. The hearing of the understanding is another. But the hearing of the spirit is not limited to any one faculty to the ear, or to the mind.
Become the world’s most thoughtful friend.
The media, far from being a conspiracy to dull the political sense of the people, could be viewed as a conspiracy to disguise the extent of political indifference.
Empathy with someone else’s pain or lack and a desire to help need to be balanced with a deeper realization of the eternal nature of all life and the illusion of all pain. Then let your peace flow into whatever you do, and you will be working on the levels of effect and cause simultaneously.
To experience visually, and to transform our visual experience into plastic terms, requires the faculty of empathy.
If it is not tempered by compassion, and empathy, reason can lead men and women into a moral void.
Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you’ll be a mile away and have his shoes.
There’s a gap somehow between empathy and activism. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of ‘soul force’ – something that emanates from a deep truth inside of us and empowers us to act. Once you identify your inner genius, you will be able to take action, whether it’s writing a check or digging a well.
You want to teach all kids the skills that are on the better side of human nature: empathy, appreciating how one’s behavior is affecting other people, resolving disagreements in ways that do not involve conflict, taking another’s perspective, honesty.
We have become a society that lacks empathy. Are we teaching empathy? The Internet desensitises, too.
An exchange of empathy provides an entry point for a lot of people to see what healing feels like.
I feel empathy wherever and whenever someone feels cornered in life. Whenever someone puts in sweat and blood and does not get the acceptance and appreciation one deserves, I resonate with it.
For me as an actor, you always sort of want to bring yourself to a character in some way. You want to find a way to approach something in a way that’s real and interesting, and also so there’s some empathy there.
Students read for tests and because their parents ask them to, but I think it’s very important to tell children that you can read for fun, too, and to understand human spirit. It builds empathy.
Like many people, most Libertarians feel empathy and sympathy for less fortunate people. But they know you can’t have perfection in a world of limited resources.
The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy.
Tony Blair has made a good contribution to the cause of peace in Ireland. He has made a great effort to understand it. He has great empathy with the need to resolve the conflict.
Our message, without preaching, is how to treat wildlife and to have empathy for all animals.
Empathy has the power to bring together people who would otherwise never meet. It has the power to teach us and to reach us in moments of isolation when we think nobody understands.
The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.
I’m really interested in the pleasure we get from stories and the pleasure we get from movies, and certainly the pleasure we get from virtual experiences. My complaint is against empathy as a moral guide. But as a source of pleasure, it can’t be beat.
Empathy is a quality of character that can change the world.
The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world’s problems.
I think we are living in selfish times. I’m the first one to say that I’m the most selfish. We live in the so-called ‘first world,’ and we may be first in a lot of things like technology, but we are behind in empathy.
Such has often been my apathy, when objects long sought, and earnestly desired, were placed within my reach.
Sex and intimacy are not the same: You can have sex all your life and never be intimate with a person. There has to be empathy in the relationship. You have to enjoy seeing through their eyes. When you’re with them, you’re there and not thinking about what you’re gonna do tomorrow.
I have a very strong feeling that the opposite of love is not hate – it’s apathy. It’s not giving a damn.
I think we could benefit from world history that is specifically taught in a multi-faceted fashion that allows for an understanding that perspectives on truth can be very different. I’m an advocate of an approach that endeavors to foster empathy and which tries to find a common humanity across the divide.
Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.
Insects are living metaphors for me. They are so alien and so remote and so perfect, but also they are emotionless; they don’t have any human or mammalian instincts. They’ll eat their young at the drop of a hat; they can eat your house! There’s no empathy – none.
The phrase ‘misuse of privilege’ is becoming a free pass to tear apart pretty much anybody we choose to. It’s becoming a devalued term, and it’s making us lose our capacity for empathy and for distinguishing between serious and unserious transgressions.
Empathy is the capacity to think and feel oneself into the inner life of another person.
Will was making a speech, something about having been young and careless once, the sort of thing old-timers said when they issued a deathblow, as if they thought their sanctimonious ramblings disguised as empathy would be welcomed, but Evie was only half listening.
There are actors who just bring an enormous amount of empathy. They just have that”it” that makes you want to follow them and root for them.
Reconciliation is a deep practice that we can do with our listening and our mindful speech. To reconcile means to bring peace and happiness to nations, people, and members of our family…. In order to reconcile, you have to possess the art of deep listening.
In my view, the best of humanity is in our exercise of empathy and compassion. It’s when we challenge ourselves to walk in the shoes of someone whose pain or plight might seem so different than yours that it’s almost incomprehensible.
Loss makes me feel vulnerable. I’ve had my share, less than so many though, but enough to feel empathy. It’s tough and I see it so much on Earth, too much suffering. The loss of free will I find unacceptable – what most of us refer to as rights.
If you take the time to listen to an upset child’s story with empathy, and guide the child toward figuring out the root of the problem, then the result is often that the child not only calms down, but also in the future is less likely to get so upset.
Empathy goes a long way, for sure. We cannot have healthy, loving, mutually respectful relationships without it. But we’re not psychic. At least I’m not. And intuition can only take you so far, especially when a person’s sense of safety, comfort, and self-worth hangs in the balance.
I hope they’re present in their lives and feel some kind of empathy. I think a lot of the mistakes that have been made in the world have been through a lack of empathy. If you can identify with someone else and empathise with someone else, then activism is a short step away, she explained in an interview with Parade.
A second even more obvious sign is that the person will stop talking. If we are uncertain as to whether we have stayed long enough in the process, we can always ask, “Is there more that you wanted to say”?
Disability is articulated as a struggle, an unnecessary burden that one must overcome to the soundtrack of a string crescendo. But disabled lives are multi-faceted – brimming with personality, pride, ambition, love, empathy, and wit.
All novels . . . are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: what is the self? How can it be grasped?
Connecting to something keeps our empathy alive.
I don’t like that new age posture where you kind of tilt your head. I don’t like that posture right now. I want something a little more confident and more sure of the values that we’re defending, which are the old ones, love and empathy and patience and tolerance and civility. Not to get into politics or anything.
As I grew up, I began to discover a little bit about the situation of black people in America and experienced an immediate empathy with the victims of such senseless discrimination. Because although the Turks were never slaves, they were regarded as enemies within Europe because of their Muslim beliefs.
I think when you’ve gone through a betrayal in life then when somebody’s been betrayed you can talk to the person about it. If your husband’s been unfaithful to you, you know what that’s like, you know how that feels. You can share true empathy with someone.
Relational trust is built on movements of the human heart such as empathy, commitment, compassion, patience, and the capacity to forgive.
Leaders with empathy do more than sympathize with people around them: they use their knowledge to improve their companies in subtle, but important ways.
I was in the Army in the 1960s. I didn’t go to Vietnam. I went to Germany, where I drank beer. But I did have an empathy with the soldiers in Vietnam.
Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.
Leadership requires the ability to engage and to create empathy for communities with disparate needs and ideas. Telling an effective story – especially in romantic suspense – demands a similar skill set.
In order to be a good emergency contact, you need a lot of friend-patience and empathy. Often, this comes from personal experience with anxiety, trauma, and depression.
Poetry is for me Eucharistic. You take someone else’s suffering into your body, their passion comes into your body, and in doing that you commune, you take communion, you make a community with others.
Reading can almost be viewed as empathy training. Movies have better action scenes, sure. But books are uniquely suited to showing you the inside of another person’s head. That is the root of empathy. That’s the first step to understanding you’re not alone in the world.
Fiction challenges us and works its miracles by placing us in the skin of another human being and teaching us empathy.
Sympathy feels like a performative word, whereas empathy is human.
A deep appreciation for politics comes from empathy for our fellow human beings and their diverse paths through life.
I always wonder about psychopaths, just because they have no empathy, does that necessarily mean they enjoy being cruel? Because we all know people who seem to have no empathy that we work with; they’re not necessarily cruel.
Anyone can be shamed, but feeling guilt requires empathy within.
There are many aspects about what and why we photograph: visual pleasure, personal empathy, intellectual stimulation, technical excellence, etc. Serious photographers and artists will try to create works that are original. Over a career period they may develop a singular identity in their images.
All that has been integrated into NVC has been known for centuries about consciousness, language, communication skills, and use of power that enable us to maintain a perspective of empathy for ourselves and others, even under trying conditions.
I like good food and I’ve always had a very natural empathy with women.
No medicine is more valuable , none more efficacious, none better suited to the cure of our temporal ills than a friend to whom we may turn for consolation in time of trouble, and with whom we may share happiness in time of joy.
I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.
I don’t want people to write programmatic environmental poems, but I think sustainability should become deeply a part of the consciousness of poetry – an impulse toward compassion, empathy, and social justice.
Imgur is a data-driven company, and our community is our most important signal. But you can’t perfectly plot humans neatly into a chart. It takes someone with instincts and empathy to truly understand the community and represent them in all of the company decisions.
If you aren’t humble, whatever empathy you claim is false and probably results from some arrogance or the desire to control. But true empathy is rooted in humility and the understanding that there are many people with as much to contribute in life as you.
Another reason I think the novel will survive is that the reader has to work in a novel. In a film, you are presented with someone else’s imagination exactly bodied out. The marvelous thing about a novel is that every reader will imagine even the very simplest sentence slightly differently.
I have said that each aspect of the novel demands a different quality of the reader. Well, the prophetic aspect demands two qualities: humility and the suspension of the sense of humour.
What we need in medical schools is not to teach empathy, as much as to preserve it. The process of learning huge volumes of information about disease, of learning a specialised language, can ironically make one lose sight of the patient one came to serve; empathy can be replaced by cynicism.
We’ve reached a point where we are not a very empathetic people, and art without empathy is art without an audience. My basic viewpoint is that without art we’re alone.
We seek to craft characters who inspire empathy: characters our audience will care for and, as a result, will care about what happens to them and thus will share the journey we have charted. A story, after all, is the character’s journey.
You can be aware and educated and informed, but you’ve got to place emphasis on being compassionate, having empathy and understanding.
I have to work hard to show people that I’m more than what they see physically; that I’m talented, and that I care and have empathy for people.
Becoming a reader grows our horizons, our appetite for the good, the true and the beautiful, and our empathy.
By “empathy,” some people mean everything that is good – compassion, kindness, warmth, love, being a mensch, changing the world – and I’m for all of those things. I’m not a monster.
Posh people blow my mind. Apart from empathy, they’re good at everything – true survivalists.
My theory is that the female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy, and that the male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems.
When I get ready to talk to people, I spend two thirds of the time thinking what they want to hear and one third thinking about what I want to say.
I tend to side with people who are considered the underdog. I have empathy.
I’ve always felt you don’t have to be completely detached, emotionally uninvolved to make precise observations. There’s nothing wrong with feeling great empathy for your subjects.
I’m not sure what gave me empathy for animals, but I do know that I have always loved animals since I was a very young child. I always felt a need to nurture and protect them. Perhaps I could see they needed that, and caring for them made me happy.
No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you’ll see why.
But it will depend on young people like you being open to new ideas and new possibilities. And it will require young people like you never to stereotype or assume the worst about other people.
I believe that stories are incredibly important, possibly in ways we don’t understand, in allowing us to make sense of our lives, in allowing us to escape our lives, in giving us empathy and in creating the world that we live in.
Every clinical encounter is an opportunity to generate social capital. Even in situations where patient needs are complex or seemingly insurmountable, it is the empathy and goodwill which makes the difference.
We can be redeemed only to the extent to which we see ourselves.
I just realized that we’re facing here is an empathy gap. And this was just another way to generate conversation about something that nobody wanted to look at.
From a purely external point of view there is no will; and to find will in any phenomenon requires a certain empathy; we observe aman’s actions and place ourselves partly but not wholly in his position; or we act, and place ourselves partly in the position of an outsider.
I think people feel like other people are very different from them… And that people who are different from them are actually sort of unworthy of the same rights or empathy. I don’t understand that.
Empathy begins with understanding life from another person’s perspective. Nobody has an objective experience of reality. It’s all through our own individual prisms.
Compassion is a living, breathing, organic emotion that vibrates through you and links you to those around you.
Empathy is the greatest virtue. From it, all virtues flow. Without it, all virtues are an act.
I need my ‘art work’ or ‘entertainment work’ or whatever to have empathy for or connection to the way I experience the world as a person.
If you ask anyone, what is morality based on? These are the two factors that always come out: One is reciprocity, … a sense of fairness, and the other one is empathy and compassion.
I hope people who read my books feel empathy for us and really see us as complicated people.
We must not overlook the role that extremists play. They are the gadflies that keep society from being too complacent.
Although I’m not particularly troubled myself, I do have a lot of empathy for troubled characters.
Some people who are recovering from depression want to use the lessons they’re learned in coping with depression and their empathy for people with depression. Others want their career to have nothing to do with depression.
I think that I come off as, ‘Nothing bothers me, I don’t care! I’m funny and sassy.’ But I’m deeply sensitive. Not only about myself but to others. Not to pat myself on the back, empathy is a quality I’ve cultivated over my life. It came naturally to me as a child.
Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.
Listening is understanding. The skill of empathy is a must to be able to listen…One can listen better if one sees the whole.
Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech.
You get your heart stomped by the opposite sex, and you’re hurting so badly that you write ‘Sometimes When We Touch.’ But then what happens when you’ve been married for 25 years? You can’t rely on those emotional male-female roller coasters. You have to start using your imagination and the powers of empathy more.
[Nixon] reduced the meaning of his life to nothing but power. In the film, we gave this sad figure consciousness of what he was. We weren’t right to do that – I don’t think he did have that consciousness. But we did it for movie reasons – to create empathy.
No matter what you do, you’re going to run into haters online. We’re not talking about ordinary, disgruntled customers who should be addressed with empathy and understanding. Haters are a breed apart.
Men of the most robust make, observe that in looking upon sore eyes they often feel a very sensible soreness in their own, which proceeds from the same reason; that organ being in the strongest man more delicate, than any other part of the body is in the weakest.
All that we can’t say is all we need to hear.
Real empathy is sometimes not insisting that it will be okay but acknowledging that it is not.
But all liberals only have empathy for the exact same victims – always the ones that are represented by powerful liberal interest groups.
I know it might sound weird, but empathy is one of the greatest creators of energy. It’s counterintuitive because it’s selfless.
There is no small act of kindness.
As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation.
Empathy requires knowing that you know nothing.
Empathy probably started out as a mechanism to improve maternal care. Mammalian mothers who were attentive to their young’s needs were more likely to rear successful offspring.
If your emotional abilities aren’t in hand, if you don’t have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can’t have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.
So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.
A respectful understanding of another’s experience.
I think it’s really healing to see movies that are based on true stories. It builds so much more compassion and empathy.
One must have the humility and the imagination to honor all deep human experiences – not least those one has never come near to sharing.
If we took the time to learn more about different places and people, perhaps we would have more empathy for each other.
True kindness presupposes the faculty of imagining as one’s own the suffering and joys of others.
Compassion and empathy are anathema to sports.
I think our jobs as parents is to raise our children with empathy – to figure out who this little character is, almost from birth, and then guide them to fulfill their best potential.
The ability to imagine oneself in another’s place and understand the other’s feelings, desires, ideas, and actions. The most obvious example, perhaps, is that of the actor or singer who genuinely feels the part he is performing.
When I did the original research for ‘Odd Girl Out,’ I asked every bullied girl I interviewed to tell me what she needed most from her family. The answer truly surprised me. It wasn’t having the best solutions, calling the school, or trying to act like everything was okay. It was empathy.
It’s very difficult to design something for someone if you have no empathy.
Empathy is not merely the basic principle of artistic creation. It is also the only path by which one can reach the truth about life and society.
You have to be able to play: this is spontaneous interaction, and it flexes all the creative muscles you need as a writer. And empathy is one of those muscles.
I want us to organize, to tell the personal stories that create empathy, which is the most revolutionary emotion. The truth of the mater is that hierarchy and violence can’t be remedied by more hierarchy and violence. The end doesn’t justify the means, the means we choose decide the end we get. The means are the end.
Empathy is not simply a matter of trying to imagine what others are going through, but having the will to muster enough courage to do something about it. In a way, empathy is predicated upon hope.
The main tenet of design thinking is empathy for the people you’re trying to design for. Leadership is exactly the same thing – building empathy for the people that you’re entrusted to help.
Once you find someone to share your ups and downs, downs are almost as good as ups.
We need empathy, we need the eyes that still can weep.
Pain shared is pain lessened; joy shared is joy increased. Thus do we refute entropy.
If none of us ever read a book that was “dangerous,” had a friend who was “different,” or joined an organization that advocated “change,” we would all be the kind of people Joe McCarthy wants.
If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can’t survive.
I think it’s so important that, if I’m writing about the real world, I stay true to it. I think that kids do compartmentalize, and they’re hopefully able to see it from a safe place of their own lives and, through that, learn something about empathy.
When we used to go to the car-wash where people would wipe the windows, my dad would go out and help them and then tip them as well, so I learned my empathy from my dad, and my mum is very empathetic too, but in a very stern way; she will always check my ego.
I’m not a pacifist. I think the suffering of innocent people can be a catalyst for moral action. But empathy puts too much weight on the scale in favor of war. Empathy can really lead to violence.
My work on what is called ‘deep reading’ explores the range of linguistic, cognitive, and affective processes that underlie not only the emergence of creative thought when we read but also the development and strengthening of capacities like empathy and critical analysis that we can apply to the rest of our lives.
Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice; Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Here’s what I think is good about ‘Ted Lasso’ and what I’m proud of in it, as a writer: It’s about kindness and teamwork and empathy, and being curious and not judgmental, but it does all of that through storytelling and plot.
The study of history requires investigation, imagination, empathy, and respect. Reverence just doesn’t enter into it.
I have always worked from that place, that if you are going to inhabit someone and get under their eyes, you need to have empathy.
I think there’s such a fine line in a relationship. The role of imagination and privacy… how much space can you allow before that becomes distance? And similarly, imagination is empathy. That’s how you achieve empathy. It’s how you can be with another person and understand how they are in the world.
You have to have empathy, knowledge and compassion for your characters if you’re a writer.
I think of empathy as a set of cumulative effects, ideally – that it can be a force shaping your habits, shaping where you put your attention and then – if you’re hard on yourself, in good ways – pushing you to translate that attention into action, on whatever scale.
The most important thing is that we need to be understood. We need someone to be able to listen to us and to understand us. Then we will suffer less.
At 10, I heard Neil Diamond’s ‘Solitary Man’ and it moved me so deeply I stood, frozen in place during school recess, feeling such empathy for the narrator in Diamond’s masterpiece that my heart was smashed.
Empathy cannot by definition oppress anyone.
Accustom yourself not to be disregarding of what someone else has to say: as far as possible enter into the mind of the speaker.
I think empathy’s a terrible danger for a writer.
If moderation is a fault, then indifference is a crime.
Empathy is a respectful understanding of what others are experiencing.
empathy, the least comfortable of human emotions.
I never liked the atmosphere of Washington . I early saw that it was impossible to build up a race of which the leaders were spending most of their time, thought and energy in trying to get into office, or in trying to stay there after they were in.
I hear much of people’s calling out to punish the guilty, but very few are concerned to clear the innocent.
Other-oriented feelings congruent with the perceived welfare of another person.
Films to the degree that they glorify mindlessness and short attention span they are bad, to the degree that they encourage empathy with people not like ourselves and encourage us to think about life, they are good.
Empathy is a respectful understanding of what others are experiencing. Instead of offering empathy, we often have a strong urge to give advice or reassurance and to explain our own position or feeling. Empathy, however, calls upon us to empty our mind and listen to others with our whole being.
If you share in a heart-felt sorrow, you can lighten the load of a friend. Sometimes facing the burden together can mend two broken hearts in the end.
It’s very rare in our lives that we’re like “Ooh, I’m going to really screw this family up.” You just don’t. You work from a place of need, like I want to finish this movie or I want to feel loved at that moment or I need empathy right now. And then, you do things that are questionable.
I believe the arts are the best way to help people go on a journey of self-discovery toward their own compassion and empathy for humanity and themselves.
If acting has any meaning, it is so that we can have greater empathy for other people.
Feeling too much is a hell of a lot better than feeling nothing.
If once the people become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions.
Democracy is based upon empathy and the recognition that some decisions are solely for the community’s benefit without regard to one’s own narrow self-interest.
For a time, I really thought acting was just impersonating. But impersonation is just big brush strokes, really. What makes acting different is empathy.
The quality you most admire in a woman? Courage moral and physical: “anima”-the ability to visualize the mind and need of a man. Also a sense of the absurd.
Simply paying attention allows us to build an emotional connection. Lacking attention, empathy hasn’t a chance.
I have been under considerable pressure to buy at least a laptop computer. I have always turned the suggestions down for the reason that I have never done creative work on a typewriter. There is to me a lack of empathy.
One who knows how to show and to accept kindness will be a friend better than any possession.
The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flГўneur finds the world ‘picturesque.
When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That’s one of the great feelings – to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.
I’ve made my life’s work spotting assholes. And you know, I think it’s harder now than ever before because there’s so many socially acceptable ways to exhibit a pathological lack of empathy.
Having pets can teach us a lot of things. For kids, they are often their first lesson in responsibility, and being responsible for the well-being of another living thing is actually great for anyone, kid or adult. It teaches empathy, consistency, and so much more – especially if that pet is a dog.
Humankind seems to have an enormous capacity for savagery, for brutality, for lack of empathy, for lack of compassion.
One should learn from a book. Books have a lot to teach us. They have a lot of empathy to impart to us, but they should also be fun. This stuff is fun! You shouldn’t pick up a book and say, “Oh my god, I’m gonna better myself by reading this.” You may better yourself by reading this, but who cares? Just have fun.
The Joker is a psychopathic, mass-murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy. Last week I probably slept an average of two hours a night. I couldn’t stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going.
There are two side to every issue.
I cry a lot when I feel empathy. I can feel heartbroken by life, and I cry quite easily, sometimes for no reason. It’s healthy, I think.
Empathy is much bigger than sympathy. When the character is empathised with, that means you have succeeded as an actor. So even if it’s a villain, the audiences don’t hate you… they understand why you have turned into a villain.
I found being a coach in ‘The Ultimate Fighter’ series hard because I had to care about others. I don’t feel a lot of empathy with others. Having kids is going to be a scary one for me – I guess I’m going to have to learn.
When people want to inspire you to turn against some group of people, they’ll often use empathy.
When you need empathy, you cannot give empathy.
Sympathy relies on a common experience. If you’re clumsy, you might have sympathy for others who tend to bump into things. Empathy, on the other hand, is the ability to understand another person’s feelings even if you’ve never experienced them yourself.
When a good man is hurt, all who would be called good must suffer with him.
I still want to get some empathy from the audience, even though she’s pathetic.
It’s kind of funny that I’ve been branded as the empathy lady when, really, what I’m doing is questioning and interrogating empathy.
I really connect with every character that I’ve played, just because I kinda have to; as an actor, you want to take them in and get to know them and like them; because they’re evil, you kinda have to like them so that you can understand them and play them and play them with some kind of empathy.
Empathy is one of our highest human skills and holds families and societies together. Feeling connected to other people is probably the deepest satisfaction we will ever know. How terrible for children who are being brought up without that capacity.
People in Third World countries think and laugh and smile, just like us. We have got to understand that we are them they are us.
I don’t think conservativism is about a deficiency. I think it’s about a commitment to an ideology that has to in some ways devalue the usefulness of empathy. I do think empathy can be learned. And enhanced.
Film is this incredible medium that allows us to feel empathy for people that are very different than us and worlds completely foreign from our own.
Desperation, weakness, vulnerability – these things will always be exploited. You need to protect the weak, ring-fence them, with something far stronger than empathy.
The functions of intellect are insufficient without courage, love, friendship, compassion and empathy.
Art is food for the soul, and an artistic climate is a healthy climate because it breeds empathy.
I’m a believer in forgiveness. I have worked with people who have been in gangs and now dedicate their lives to helping inner city kids. I’ve run offender services with teachings of responsibility, empathy and understanding of the victims at their heart. I’ve seen people change.
The arts bridge cultures; they’re good for the economy, and they’re good for fostering empathy and decency.
One of the benefits of aligning yourself with an indistinct cluster of people is that claiming to feel their pain is often enough.
You can be right or you can have empathy. You can’t do both.
The heart of an Irishman is nothing but his imagination
The outward expression of empathy is courtesy.
It’s hard to pull apart empathy from compassion. What is really clear is that we innately care for other people at least to some extent.
Wolf Boy is absolutely beguiling. Evan Kuhlman has boundless empathy for all his characters, and his wonderful protagonist Stephen is, in turn, boundlessly inventive. . . . This is an auspicious debut.
The arts are the most uniquely suited to provide young people with critical-thinking skills, problem-solving, teamwork and collaboration, empathy and tolerance and compassion, looking at the other point of views.
Writing is weaponized empathy. It’s putting yourself in someone else’s head. It’s finding what’s in them that relates to you.
If empathy channels our optimism, we will see the empathy and the diseases and the poor school. We will answer with our innovations and we will surprise the pessimists.
Yet, taught by time, my heart has learned to glow for other’s good, and melt at other’s woe.
An affective response more appropriate to another’s situation than one’s own.
I hope to leave my children a sense of empathy and pity and a will to right social wrongs
My life was forever changed by people who took the time and had the patience to learn my story and to share theirs with me. They forsook judgment and came to me with kindness and empathy and the impact of that decision was huge.
When you talk, you repeat what you already know; when you listen, you often learn something.
A little anger is a good thing if it isn’t on your own behalf, if it’s for others deserving of your anger, your empathy.
It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.
As far as I’m concerned, the most important thing you need when inventing characters is empathy.
When your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival.
Bottom 10 Percent progressives are not enthusiastic about concentrations of wealth. But that’s not what keeps them up at night. Their focus is on deprivation and lack of opportunity. They’re motivated by empathy for people who are suffering, rather than outrage over unjustified wealth.
The joy of great fiction is that it transports the reader to another world, where new characters live in otherwise unimaginable ways. It is one of the most powerful ways of generating empathy that I know.
You need to indoctrinate empathy out of people in order to arrive at extreme capitalist positions.
Empathy is a necessary step for truth and reconciliation.
I travel around the world in a way that tries to open my mind and give me empathy and inspire me to come home and make this world a better place.
The best way I can get understanding from another person is to give this person the understanding, too. If I want them to hear my needs and feelings, I first need to empathize.
If I can help create empathy and balance in society, I’m going to do whatever I can to tell stories that subconsciously create that.
Neuroscience has proven that similar areas of the brain are activated both in the person who suffers and in the one who feels empathy. Thus empathic suffering is a true experience of suffering.
The rage of someone who continues to strive so hard and work so hard but is interrupted every day by society, by racism, by white supremacy, by the patriarchy – how can you not feel empathy?
I will only take something or agree to do something that I feel like I understand, and inherent in understanding is empathy.
Empathy is a special way of coming to know another and ourself, a kind of attuning and understanding. When empathy is extended, it satisfies our needs and wish for intimacy, it rescues us from our feelings of aloneness.
Empathy is the most mysterious transaction that the human soul can have, and its accessible to all of us, but we have to give ourselves the opportunity to identify, to plunge ourselves in a story where we see the world from the bottom up or through anothers eyes or heart.
People with lower incomes tend to give a greater percentage of their incomes to help others and show greater empathy and compassion – perhaps because they know they might face the same circumstances.
It’s harder to empathize with those who appear to possess more power, status, or resources.
No one…can live in this heightened state of reflective receptivity forever. Because this empathy’s involuntary, there’s terror here. Loss of control, a seepage. Becoming someone else or worse: becoming nothing but the vibratory field between two people.
In my book [“Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age], I argue that we’re vulnerable to technologies.There’s a 40 percent decline in all markers for empathy among college students, with most of it taking place in the past years.
If you have this deep feeling of empathy for the natural world, you feel it so profoundly. It’s almost a religious experience. I feel that I could never really say the depth of feeling or connection I feel to the natural world, which has made me.
I’ve always explored various areas of society. And I love the young people. And I had an empathy for prisoners and did concerts for them back when I thought that it would make a difference – you know? – that they really were there to be rehabilitated.
I have empathy towards bullying. Not about punishing the bully but empowering the victim. We have a tendency to use the word “bully” and other words in the wrong situations, thus desensitizing and lessening the impact of the true situation.
I have a profound empathy for people who are in the public eye, whether they manifest it themselves or whether it happened by accident – it doesn’t matter to me. I think there’s a great misunderstanding of what it is to be famous.
Compassion is a verb.
Empathy and social skills are social intelligence, the interpersonal part of emotional intelligence. That’s why they look alike.
I have never thought of my entertainment as being able to bring about social change. I am seriously always looking for the laugh. What it did make me conscious of was having empathy for those without any power in this country. That has always stuck with me.
Agnosticism is no excuse for indecision. If anything, it is a catalyst for action; for in shifting concern away from a future life and back to the present, it demands an ethics of empathy rather than a metaphysics of fear and hope.
The biggest deficit that we have in our society and in the world right now is an empathy deficit. We are in great need of people being able to stand in somebody else’s shoes and see the world through their eyes.
Empathy is the starting point for creating a community and taking action. It’s the impetus for creating change.
We think we listen, but very rarely do we listen with real understanding, true empathy. Yet listening, of this very special kind, is one of the most potent forces for change that I know.
Humility is my table, respect is my garment, empathy is my food and curiosity is my drink. As for love, it has a thousand names and is by my side at every window.
Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It’s the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else’s pain is as meaningful as your own.
The way I regard those who hurt me today will affect how I experience the world in the future. In any encounter, we have a choice: we can strengthen our resentment or our understanding and empathy. We can widen the gap between ourselves and others or lessen it.
The empathic understanding of the experience of other human beings is as basic an endowment of man as his vision, hearing, touch, taste and smell
My husband and I grew up with parents who supported our passion, and we’re grateful to them for that. It really helps you find your identity when you’re younger. It helps you become a really well-rounded person, the more you can show from different perspectives. The arts show us empathy, which is so important.
I had an empathy for prisoners and did concerts for them back when I thought that it would make a difference – you know? – that they really were there to be rehabilitated.
The mother condemned for a witch and burnt with dry
wood, and her children gazing on;
The hounded slave that flags in the race and leans by the
fence, blowing and covered with sweat,
The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck,
The murderous buckshot and the bullets,
All these I feel or am.
wood, and her children gazing on;
The hounded slave that flags in the race and leans by the
fence, blowing and covered with sweat,
The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck,
The murderous buckshot and the bullets,
All these I feel or am.
The ability to infer the specific content of another person’s thoughts and feelings.
We need all people, everyone, to think for themselves, to think critically, to think abstractly, to develop their powers of empathy.
All advocacy is, at its core, an exercise in empathy.
Our culture is now one of masculine triumphalism, in which transhistorically feminine expressions – empathy, sweetness, volubility, warmth – are seen as impediments to a woman’s professional trajectory in many sectors.
I love the theatre and Miller is one of my all-time favourite playwrights. ‘All My Sons’ is a very socialist play, which exposes the lack of empathy that can accompany capitalism when it is left unchecked.
When I came to the last line of ‘Car Crash While Hitchhiking,’ I read it as a pitiless statement of indifference: a refusal to warn the family of their impending collision, a refusal to help when miraculously spared, a refusal to act on the empathy hiding behind the story’s language.
Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it’s the readers who build that world in their own minds.
Have empathy, gratitude and respect for every position in the company.
Through watering the ground of affectionate love with cherishing love, And then sowing the seeds of wishing love and compassion, the medicinal tree of Bodhichitta will grow.
When you start to develop your powers of empathy and imagination, the whole world opens up to you.
Build bridges of insight through empathy, see the world through the eyes of others, understand the world through their experiences, and feel the world through their emotions.
We live in an epidemic of self-hatred. I see it daily with people coming at me, and they do it to everybody, it’s not just me. The hatred is really stemming from them not liking themselves. When you look at it that way, I feel so much empathy and understanding for those people.
Remember that everyone you meet is afraid of something, loves something and has lost something.
Think in terms of what’s good for the other person and success will seek you out.
Tell them, that, to ease them of their griefs, Their fear of hostile strokes, their aches, losses, Their pangs of love, with other incident throes That nature’s fragile vessel doth sustain In life’s uncertain voyage, I will some kindness do them.
I have absolutely no empathy for camels. I didn’t care for being abused in the Middle East by those horrible, horrible, horrible creatures. They don’t like people. It’s not at all like the relationship between horses and humans.
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
I always feel that life can teach you how to act. I’m always looking at life through other people’s eyes. By feeling empathy. And I do feel that I am constantly learning.
On the one hand, our social nature is our greatest beauty – it means that we have natural empathy and sympathy. But our social nature also means that we may let ourselves be controlled by the judgments of others, precisely because we care so much about our status in community.
Ten people who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent.
There’s a power in empathy.
That only a few, under any circumstances, protest against the injustice of long-established laws and customs, does not disprove the fact of the oppressions, while the satisfaction of the many, if real only proves their apathy and deeper degradation.
The number one rule of our training is empathy before education.
Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let’s use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy and remind ourselves of all the ways that our hopes and dreams are bound together.
A novel can enlarge the empathy and imagination of both its author and its reader, and my experience, that sense of enlargement is most intense when I’m transported beyond the narrow limits of my daily life.
Seek to understand rather than be understood.
Empathy is intuitive, but it is also something you can work on intellectually.
If the spectrum linking everyday depression to Major Depression sometimes hinders understanding of it, it also offers an opportunity for empathy. Because almost everyone, at some point, experiences feelings of sadness, of hopelessness, of emptiness, not to mention lethargy and irritability.
Women bring with them into the world a certain virtue, a divine gift that makes them adept at instilling such qualities as faith, courage, empathy and refinement in relationships and in cultures.
Starting a startup is a process of trial and error. What guided the founders through this process was their empathy for the users. They never lost sight of making things that people would want.
Effective engagement is inspired by the empathy that develops simply by being human.
We always tend to distrust geniuses about genius, as if what they say didn’t arouse much empathy in us, or as if we were waiting till some more reliable source of information came along…
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
I think that’s almost what it is sometimes if you sum up what acting is. It’s just the ultimate expression of empathy.
This precious thing of empathy and love and understanding is something we have to hold and appreciate and protect.
There’s a gap somehow between empathy and activism. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of ‘soul force’ – something that emanates from a deep truth inside of us and empowers us to act. Once you identify your inner genius, you will be able to take action, whether it’s writing a check or digging a well.
This is the most enormous extension of vision of which life is capable: the projection of itself into other lives. This is the lonely, magnificent power of humanity. It is . . . the supreme epitome of the reaching out.
For me, it’s common sense to treat other people like you would like to be treated. Empathy is a broad concept, but how do you get there? People get there differently. I get there by truly building a little trust and connection. You’ll tell me something, I’ll act on it, and then that builds on itself.
Most of my work is comedy; it’s meant to inspire empathy in people and help them find joy.
We need to understand the other side to impact the other side. We become much more effective as humans and leaders when we engage in hearty conversations with those who are different from us, not necessarily to change our opinions, but to build the empathy muscle.
It’s not a very nice thing to not have empathy. I would like to have empathy. In the past I haven’t been very empathetic with other people.
How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.
We need to receive empathy to give empathy.
The art of integrating the ego and the impulse for empathy in a dynamic call and response.
Were we incapable of empathy – of putting ourselves in the position of others and seeing that their suffering is like our own – then ethical reasoning would lead nowhere. If emotion without reason is blind, then reason without emotion is impotent.
Stop the habit of wishful thinking and start the habit of thoughtful wishes.
In a world where women work three times as hard for half as much, our achievement has been denigrated, both marriage and divorce have turned against us, our motherhood has been used as an obstacle to our success, our passion as a trap, our empathy for others as an excuse to underpay us.
Just as white light consists of colored rays, so reverence for life contains all the components of ethics: love, kindliness, sympathy, empathy, peacefulness and power to forgive.
If I’m talking to someone in a crowded room, I try to make this person feel as though we’re the only ones present. I shut out everything else. I look directly at the person. Even if a gorilla were to walk into the room, I probably wouldn’t notice it.
Empathy seems to be seen as a weakness. We condition people to withdraw it to succeed. But really, it needs to be re-seen as a strength again if there is to be any kind of hope in the world.
Insensitivity makes arrogance ugly; empathy is what makes humility beautiful.
Because of empathy, we care more for, and devote far more resources to, someone who is familiar, from our country or our group, than a stranger.
We need to have empathy. When we lose empathy, we lose our humanity.
Great teaching requires incredible talent and dedication, strong intellectual ability and interpersonal skill, real discipline and empathy.
I’ll be there for you, I will care for you, I keep thinking you just don’t know. Tryna run from that, say you’re done wit that, on your face girl it just don’t show.
I have a great deal of empathy for anyone who’s having a hard time. I believe this ability to see another’s viewpoint has served me well as a writer.
He who wishes to paint Christ’s story must live with Christ.
Virtual reality is the ‘ultimate empathy machine.’ These experiences are more than documentaries. They’re opportunities to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.
But compassion isn’t about solutions. It’s about giving all the love that you’ve got.
Every child must master empathy-based ethics because the rules are changing; the less they apply the less learning them has positive impact
Part of the particular interest and beauty of science fiction and fantasy: writer and reader collaborate in world-making.
I believe that lack of empathy is behind many problems, and I believe that it’s disrupting our society. In Great Britain, there is a steady decline in the willingness to be truly generous, and by that I don’t mean monetary generosity, but friendship and sympathy for others.
I want to see more families have more compassion, more empathy in understanding that not every family is sitting there intentionally saying, ‘I don’t care about everybody else.’ They’re just trying to do the best that they can.
When bad things happened to other people, I imagined them happening to me. I didn’t know if this was empathy or theft.
I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.
But the moods could be contagious. He didn’t need one right now.
I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine.
What makes us different from other species is our capacity for compassion and empathy with the struggles of other people.
Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel empathy for people we’ve never met, living lives we couldn’t possibly experience for ourselves, because the book puts us inside the character’s skin.
Empathy lies in our ability to be present without opinion.
Education leads to enlightenment. Enlightenment opens the way to empathy. Empathy foreshadows reform.
Empathy is the bridge to understand those who you may be lucky to one day lead, and it is – in my opinion – the most under-appreciated human skill in business.
What we were most hoping to achieve with Shots Fired: empathy for all of the characters and conversations about our criminal justice system, which is broken on every level, from the street all the way up to the highest level of government.
One feels so despairing on some levels about what’s going on in our culture, in regards to things like gender inequality. But there is progress. There is enhanced empathy and respect for others, we are fighting the tide, even though it seems like a tug of war sometimes.
Remember that for someone to be so mean, something must be going on with them. Something must be happening to make them so unhappy that they feel the need to bring others down. I try to have empathy for them.
In a high-IQ job pool, soft skills like discipline, drive and empathy mark those who emerge as outstanding.
I think art, especially literature, has the particular power to immerse the viewer or reader into another world. This is especially powerful in literature, when a reader lives the experience of the characters. So if the characters are human and real enough, then readers will feel empathy for them.
Everyone is always in need of something that another person can give, be it undivided attention, a kind word or deep empathy. There is no better use of a life than to be attentive to such needs.
With empathy, I’m fully with them, not full of them — that’s sympathy.
That’s what happens in a good horror movie: there are always metaphors of greater subjects like humanity and empathy and compassion. It’s not about the action and scary moments: You really care about these characters because they’re mirrors of our own reflections.
Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels-the biggest sin is to be blind to others problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence.
You definitely put a bit of yourself in every character, and you always have to have an understanding and empathy for the person that you play.
There are some men formed with feelings so blunt that they can hardly be said to be awake during the whole course of their lives.
Despair is despair, sorrow is sorrow, death is death. It’s not about who is experiencing it; it’s about building a bridge of empathy across these experiences.
The study of history requires investigation, imagination, empathy, and respect. Reverence just doesnt enter into it.
A sketch of a man facing to the right.
Some public officials are blessed – you can’t acquire this, but you are blessed with the gift of empathy, being able to empathize with those who are suffering.
Powerful is our need to be known, really known by ourselves and others, even if only for a moment.
The absence on the panel of anyone who could become pregnant accidentally or discover her salary was five thousand dollars a yearless than that of her male counterpart meant there was a hole in the consciousness of the committee that empathy, however welcome, could not entirely fill.
When we focus on others, our world expands.
Humans aren’t as good as we should be in our capacity to empathize with feelings and thoughts of others, be they humans or other animals on Earth.
My respect and empathy towards animals includes sea dwellers too–from dolphins to fish to lobsters. So, of course, I wouldn’t dream of eating them.
We live in a world where joy and empathy and pleasure are all around us, there for the noticing.
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
We need to strengthen such inner values as contentment, patience and tolerance, as well as compassion for others. Keeping in mind that it is expressions of affection rather than money and power that attract real friends, compassion is the key to ensuring our own well-being.
We were awash in tiny attentions. Small gestures, words, empathies thought to be extinct came to life… We discovered the color of each other’s eyes.
I argue that we should be kind, we should be compassionate, and we should definitely be reasonable and rational, but that empathy leads us astray.
When you engage in compassion, and you hear a distressing sound, like someone calling for help, there is an activation in an area of the brain called the insular, which has to do with empathy and altruism, that is vastly more activated than in non-meditators.
Once kids begin to realize that they are connected to a greater good and greater whole, then that will lessen the possibility that they will act out violently because it creates empathy.
Comedy and drama are different sides of the same coin. And the thing about comedy and drama is about likability. It’s about character first. It’s about story. And for me, it’s about empathy, and I think the realer someone is, the further you can go either way with them.
Of all the arts, movies are the most powerful aid to empathy, and good ones make us into better people.
I love my ability to generate empathy and compassion within myself and others.
There is nothing harder than the softness of indifference.
And connected is helping people stay in touch and maintain empathy for each other, and bandwidth.
You know when ubuntu is there, and it is obvious when it is absent. It has to do with what it means to be truly human, to know that you are bound up with others in the bundle of life.
People who work on the user interface side need to have empathy as a key characteristic. But if you are writing device drivers you don’t really need to understand humans so well.
Mercy is compassion, kindness, empathy, forgiveness. While grace might be described as blessings and favor from God that we do not necessarily deserve, mercy represents not receiving what we do deserve because of the patience, love, and atonement of the Master.
Sometimes I’m asked by kids why I condemn marijuana when I haven’t tried it. The greatest obstetricians in the world have never been pregnant.
One doesn’t have to operate with great malice to do great harm. The absence of empathy and understanding are sufficient. In fact, a man convinced of his virtue even in the midst of his vice is the worst kind of man.
It art can only succeed through the cooperating imagination and intelligence of its consumers, who fill out, for themselves, the artist’s world and make it round, and whose own special genius partly determine the ultimate glory of it.
Empathy isn’t as hard as it sounds because people have a lot of the same feelings. And it helps to understand other people because then you can actually care about them sometimes. And help them. And have a friend.
My empathy for poor people comes from having been one of them for so long, from knowing that their humanity is more complex and that the truths of their suffering have to be told honestly.
I think your main draws are instinct, intuition and empathy… those things that you can’t really practice.
One of his greatest talents was empathy; no sadist can aspire to perfection without that diagnostic ability.
I don’t know, I don’t care, and it doesn’t make any difference.
Something as important and central and encompassing as empathy can’t be all bad. I think empathy plays a role in intimate relationships, where you might want your partner not just to care about you or understand you but to feel what you feel.
We work on ourselves in order to help others, but also we help others in order to work on ourselves.
I see Lord Buddha in the 21st Century across national borders, across faith systems, across political ideologies, playing the role of a bridge to promote understanding to counsel patience and to enlighten us with tolerance and empathy.
I don’t believe we would’ve had nearly as diverse a Congress if it weren’t for social media. I don’t think that there would be the same appreciation or empathy for human rights across the world if it weren’t for social media.
Deeply affecting and compulsively readable, The Fifty-First State displays Lisa Borders’ emotional acuity, first-rate skills as a storyteller, and profound empathy not only for her two compelling main characters but for an oft-neglected region and a disappearing way of life.
Empathy works so well because it does not require a solution. It requires only understanding.
The first word that always came into my head with Henry VI was ’empathy.’ He doesn’t have a barrier between what other people feel and what he feels.
I emphasize listening. We strive to hear what other people want us to hear, even though they don’t always come out and say it directly.
It was a strange thing, this feeling of empathy. He’d never experienced it before. He realized that what hurt this woman hurt him as well, that what made her bleed caused a hemorrhage of pain within his soul.
True contentment comes with empathy.
Fiction is empathy technology.
When a mother quarrels with a daughter, she has a double dose of unhappiness-hers from the conflict, and empathy with her daughter’s from the conflict with her. Throughout her life a mother retains this special need to maintain a good relationship with her daughter.
My worst vice is also my best vice. It’s my empathy and my love for people-it can wear me out. I rarely can turn a person in need down or because I love people, I love energy.
Staying with empathy we allow speakers to touch deeper levels of themselves.
The measure of a friendship is not its physicality but its significance. Good friendships, online or off, urge us toward empathy; they give us comfort and also pull us out of the prisons of our selves.
Now, inventiveness and empathy, those qualities, if they’re together in the same person, you’ve got an entrepreneurial genius. But they do tend to be slightly separate.
There is absolutely no single aspect of one’s personality that is more important to develop than empathy, which is not a skill at which men typically are asked to excel. I believe empathy is not only the core of art, literature and music, but should also be at the core of society, from ethics to economics.
A love of reading shows empathy, the desire to understand how others live or act or might act – and why.
We need silence to be able to touch souls.
Look, I’m a cancer survivor, all right? So I have great personal empathy for people who have pre-existing conditions and can’t get insurance.
…these stories are a kind of beacon. By making stories full of empathy and amusement and the sheer pleasure of discovering the world, these writers reassert the fact that we live in a world where joy and empathy and pleasure are all around us, there for the noticing.
I think it’s easy to mistake understanding for empathy – we want empathy so badly. Maybe learning to make that distinction is part of growing up. It’s hard and ugly to know somebody can understand you without even liking you.
In lazy apathy let stoics boast, their virtue fixed, ’tis fixed as in a frost.
I don’t know whether your heart ever necessarily changes, but time changes the way that you perceive the world. And you just hope it gives you more empathy and all those other things.
If evil is empathy erosion, and empathy erosion is a form of illness, then evil turns out to be nothing more than a particularly awful psychological disorder.
The female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy. The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems.
It’s hard to penetrate characters who are very cut off and lack empathy and to do it with sympathy. It’s so easy to make a damaged character repugnant.
Understanding people’s difficulties and-just as crucial-helping people understand their own difficulties and teaching them concrete ways to help themselves will help them better deal with their own lives and, in turn, ours.
Feeling one “has”; love occurs.
Empathy for the people you’re working with and being aware of their needs…that’s the “big kahuna” in managing people.
The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.
Empathy is the key to great stories.
American popular culture has long been marked by an absence of empathy for American Indians. Westerns doubled as a campaign against so-called savages in a way that desensitized us to the savages we’d become.
Empathy is the most powerful weapon […]
Too often, wealthy people born on third base blithely criticize the poor for failing to hit home runs. The advantaged sometimes perceive empathy as a sign of muddle-headed weakness rather than as a marker of civilization.
There are many respects in which America, if it can bring itself to act with the magnanimity and the empathy appropriate to its size and power, can be an intelligent example to the world.
Compassion and empathy are not the same as feeling sorry for oneself. They are emotions that extend our perceptual ranges.
My journey has mainly been driven by empathy towards people who I thought were suffering.
Time and again, people transcend the paralyzing effects of psychological pain when they have sufficient contact with someone who can hear them empathically.
I’ve had empathy toward what Carson McCullers calls “the invisible people” all my life and was inherently interested in what redeemed Mancil Travis, what fueled Mancil, what destroyed Mancil, etc. I think everyone wants redemption including Mancil.
Traits like humility, courage, and empathy are easily overlooked – but it’s immensely important to find them in your closest relationships.
It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become prey to the active. The conditions upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime, and the punishment of his guilt.
You don’t need religion to have morals. If you can’t decide right from wrong then you lack empathy, not religion.
As I watch government at all levels daily eat away at our freedom, I keep thinking how prosperity and government largesse have combined to make most of us fat and lazy and indifferent to, or actually in favor of, the limits being placed on that freedom.
Learning the edges or limits or sources of friction in empathy was one of the big issues for me.
As a child, I lived with being punier than other boys in class. The only consolation was my parents’ empathy – they encouraged constant trips to the local drugstore for chocolate milk shakes to fatten me up. The shakes made me happy, but still, all through grammar school, other kids shoved me around.
The person in New York City is showing too little empathy for the Trump voter. The Trump voter is showing too little empathy for the person who’s very worried about the refugee ban. They’re not spending enough time with each other to have a meaningful conversation.
We need to renegotiate our contract with nature. Ecology is a unifying force that can diminish intolerance and expand our empathy towards others – both human and animal.
My grandmother was an unparalleled storyteller who gave me a preview of how life might turn out, and also fortified my empathy.
Jane Austen writes about these humdrum lives with such empathy that they seem endlessly fascinating
Empathy isn’t the same thing as expressing emotions. It’s not about sharing your feelings – it can be really uncomfortable if a parent cries or loses strength at the moment her daughter needs it most. The message sent is that you need to be taken care of, not the other way around.
Only your compassion and your loving kindness are invincible, and without limit.
Animals should have rights and should be treated with compassion and empathy; we are their caretakers. If you don’t have it in your heart to help them, then just leave them alone and do no harm.
Empathic listening takes time, but it doesn’t take anywhere near as much time as it takes to back up and correct misunderstandings when you’re already miles down the road; to redo; to live with unexpressed and unsolved problems; to deal with the results of not giving people psychological air.
Character robotics could plant the seed for robots that actually have empathy. So, if they achieve human level intelligence or, quite possibly, greater than human levels of intelligence, this could be the seeds of hope for our future.
We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible.
The ability to experience and understand what others feel without confusion between oneself and others.
Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?
In learning to pay respectful attention to one another and plants and animals, we relearn the acts of empathy, and thus humility and compassion – ways of proceeding that grow more and more necessary as the world crowds in.
Empathy is a virtue, but it should not be a guiding judicial principle.
We must learn to regard people less in light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.
I think I identify as a comedian before kind of anything else. Before I identify as a person, as a human being with empathy.
Negotiation is empathy. It’s almost trite to say that if you can’t put yourself in the seat of the other person you’re speaking with, you’re not going to do well. It’s not about being a bully, not about making offers people can’t refuse.
I think empathy is a beautiful thing. I think that’s the power of film though. We have one of the most powerful, one of the greatest communicative tools known to man.
In this sullen apathy neither true wisdom nor true happiness can be found.
The struggle of my life created empathy – I could relate to pain, being abandoned, having people not love me.
Musicians know all about unemployment. You’re unemployed a lot, and I think there’s a great deal of empathy between musicians and people who are out of work.
The best way to have empathy for people and the best way to have empathy for our Constitution is to appoint judges who will rule based on the law and to have empathy, if you will, for the law only and to rule based on the law.
On many issues, empathy can pull us in the wrong direction. The outrage that comes from adopting the perspective of a victim can drive an appetite for retribution.
Criticizing others is a dangerous thing, not so much because you may make mistakes about them, but because you may be revealing the truth about yourself.
I do not think I will ever become deadened, because I live in other people’s lives, I must admit there are times when it weighs medown because I can’t do some of the things I want.
I am truly passionate and concerned about the lack of empathy that people show towards one another.
A whole lot of the way identity politics has gone seems to me to deny empathy.
True empathy is always free of any evaluative or diagnostic quality. This comes across to the recipient with some surprise. “If I am not being judged, perhaps I am not so evil or abnormal as I have thought”.
Empathy is key in the design process, especially when you start expanding outside of your comfort zone to new languages, cultures, and age groups. If you try to assume what those people want, you’re likely to get it wrong.
What’s important now are the characteristics of the brain’s right hemisphere: artistry, empathy, inventiveness, big-picture thinking. These skills have become first among equals in a whole range of business fields.
In my work as an actor, I have been given even greater insights and have been guided towards empathy and a consciousness of those who are less fortunate.
I am more interested in teaching my children empathy than subscribing to our ‘me’ culture and obsessing about ‘how do I feel’ all the time.
She [Hillary Clinton] exudes leadership, confidence and – importantly – empathy, compassion, and understanding.
Stuart Rojstaczer writes with enormous wit, style and empathy, and The Mathematician’s Shiva is a big-hearted, rollickingly funny novel that’s impossible to put down. A tremendous debut.
Writing fiction, like reading fiction, is a practice in empathy.
Our ability to offer empathy can allow us to stay vulnerable, defuse potential violence, help us hear the word ‘no’ without taking it as a rejection, revive lifeless conversation, and even hear the feelings and needs expressed through silence.
Empathy is the wellspring of creativity.
It’s one of the things that weirdly I always used to like about my job: that expressing the emotions of a writer or someone creative and breathing empathy and life into a character people can then identify with, that they’d feel less alone.
Is it ignorance or apathy? Hey, I don’t know and I don’t care.
Political correctness is anti-empathetic because it has correctness in it. We all have biases, we all have prejudices and if we cant talk about them openly – if we get attacked for it then this is an anti-empathetic movement and therefore it cannot complain about a lack of empathy.
Artificial intelligence is growing up fast, as are robots whose facial expressions can elicit empathy and make your mirror neurons quiver.
Empathy gives you the ability to enjoy another person’s pain.
We need to teach empathy as we do literacy.
I do not shy away from accepting that I had a troubled past, but in the journey of coming out of that dark phase, I understand humans better. I am less judgmental and more compassionate. I learned empathy and forgiveness, and that gives me confidence as a person.
When you see yourself as the center of things, it deprives you of a certain level of empathy.
We humans are wired for empathy by evolution, but when children grow up in dominator families they internalize this male over female template for relations early on. They then automatically apply it to other differences, whether based on race, religion, sexual orientation, and so forth.
Hurt people hurt people. That’s how pain patterns gets passed on, generation after generation after generation. Break the chain today. Meet anger with sympathy, contempt with compassion, cruelty with kindness. Greet grimaces with smiles. Forgive and forget about finding fault. Love is the weapon of the future.
A lot of very successful businessmen share some of these sociopathic traits – a lack of empathy, seeing people as commodities, projecting an air of sincerity when everything is actually calculated.
We have to have a revolution so that all young people grasp empathy and practice it. This is the most fundamental revolution that we have to get through.
Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us — a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain — it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves.
I think I’m an actor because I have very strong imagination and empathy. I never studied acting, but those two qualities are exactly the qualities that make for an activist.
People are starting to understand the other side’s perspective and that’s where empathy can sort of begin – once you quit judging other people but just understand where they’re coming from.
If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.
Even worse than seeing women’s privacy violated on social media is reading the accompanying comments that show such a lack of empathy.
After the Ankara bombings on October 10, people were asked to hold a minute of silence, but many refused. Our society can’t even unite in grief to honor the victims. We’ve lost our empathy. That’s maybe the worst.
I think being able to sit in the shoes of a woman and being able to manage products that are mostly sold to women, alongside a lot of female employees, is really helpful because you hold that empathy to the situation. You can understand where the customer is coming from.
Resilience is, of course, necessary for a warrior. But a lack of empathy isn’t.
We live in a culture that discourages empathy. A culture that too often tells us our principle goal in life is to be rich, thin, young, famous, safe, and entertained.
Empathy is patiently and sincerely seeing the world through the other person’s eyes. It is not learned in school; it is cultivated over a lifetime.
The mobile revolution has dramatically changed our world view, empowered women, and increased our empathy. Corrupt governments have been toppled and wars avoided because our species has become so digitally connected.
My own feeling is we need more compassion, we need more empathy, we need more togetherness, in terms of working together.
Among all the creatures of creation, the gods favor us: We are the only ones who can empathize with their problems.
Empathy, humanity and support for each other is more important than revenue, than growth.
When you are the head of any philanthropy organization, what you learn is empathy, how to listen and be responsive to people’s needs.
The grieving are surely owed our empathy, but capital punishment can neither right a wrong nor prevent another from happening.
He’s really sort of the devil. He’s completely emotionally detached. He has no empathy. You find that in psychopaths. It’s about power with Voldemort. It’s an aphrodisiac for him. Power makes him feel alive.
I think people relate to the music because I have a sense of empathy, and I think I have a good understanding about relationships, and I talk about them in a real, honest way
When people are really suffering, and we know they’re suffering, that question can be a very difficult one. Inadvertently, I think without anyone meaning it, it communicates a lack of empathy.
Shame cannot survive being spoken. It cannot survive empathy.
I did not know how to reach him, how to catch up with him… The land of tears is so mysterious.
I think understanding or comprehension is probably the strongest emotion that you feel, or at least some kind of empathy.
The basic skill of an actor is, in fact, empathy, and that’s maybe not a skill, it’s a disposition. I am an assistant storyteller. I enjoy feeling useful to a team effort. It’s my way of finding a use for myself, a utility in this world.
To perceive is to suffer.
Love is not without its flaws. The stronger the love, the more it tests you. Compassion and empathy will make true love persist.
Sen. Akaka’s care, empathy and compassion were evident to everyone who knew him.
I do have a side as a citizen, and I’ve always expressed it, and that’s where I’ve gotten into misunderstandings, because some people see me as a leftist nut or whatever. A conspiracy nut. All that stuff. These are definitions that don’t really apply to a dramatist, because a dramatist is working from empathy.
For me, documentary photography has always come with great responsibility. Not just to tell the story honestly and with empathy, but also to make sure the right people hear it. When you photograph somebody who is in pain or discomfort, they trust you to make sure the images will act as their advocate.
The art of listening needs its highest development in listening to oneself; our most important task is to develop an ear that can really hear what we’re saying.
Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see.
We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old – and that’s the criterion by which I’ll be selecting my judges.
Gentleness, self-sacrifice and generosity are the exclusive possession of no one race or religion.
Women are just so much tougher and more patient than men are – their capacity for empathy blows me away. And their capacity to deal with stress for long periods of time is also kind of awe inspiring.
Trying to observe the slow shift from self-centeredness to empathy is like trying to watch grass grow.
I believe I know why it is satisfying to me to hear someone. When I can really hear someone, it puts me in touch with him; it enriches my life. It is through hearing people that I have learned all that I know about individuals, about personality, about interpersonal relationships.
Look at the other side of things even if you know you’ll never agree. It creates empathy.
Some people think only intellect counts: knowing how to solve problems, knowing how to get by, knowing how to identify an advantage and seize it. But the functions of intellect are insufficient without courage, love, friendship, compassion, and empathy.
Life is always going to be a series of ouch-making moments, and the question was, was I going to go all fetal position, or was I going to woman up? I went into fetal position on the bed to think about this. Fetal position turned out to be very comfortable.
Let us join together across denominations, religions and cultures to make a habit of empathy and reach out to those most in need. To share the blessings we enjoy and to advance the cause of peace in all corners of our world.
While leaders spend considerable time and effort trying to envision markets and pushing out innovation, empathy can often generate simple, yet breakthrough ideas.
Listening is where love begins: listening to ourselves and then to our neighbors.
That’s what reading was for my mother, and became for me – a way to escape, a private time machine, a place that began with moral instruction but soon morphed into empathy and imagination.
Translate all self-judgments into self-empathy.
If you put shame in a petri dish, it needs three ingredients to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence, and judgment. If you put the same amount of shame in the petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can’t survive.
Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals.
I draw a lot from Buddhism, which focuses on compassion and kindness, loving kindness, as they call it, but rejects empathy because it’s a poor moral guide. And I think there’s a lot of evidence suggesting that they’re right.
Leadership is about empathy.
All I ever wanted was to reach out and touch another human being not just with my hands but with my heart.
I started young but at every turn, listening provided a foundation for my leadership. I can say categorically that all the really excellent leaders I have known were, in my view, excellent listeners.
Unfortunately, people not just in India but globally seem to be lacking empathy. Not just during the pandemic, but in other times too.
I am older and have more control over my empathy,’ said Qwan. ‘That’s why I didn’t throw up.’ And having said that, he threw up.
There’s a big difference between showing interest and really taking interest.
Bless you for your jealousy; it is a sign of empathy.
We have to teach empathy as we do literacy.
Plays can create empathy. If you put a Muslim character on stage, and make him a full character, you’re making it possible for the audience to feel empathy, and a little empathy on both sides would help.
In terms of essays, I would say Oliver Sacks. His breadth of hard knowledge and imagination and empathy seems to constitute the perfect mind to me.
Depression is a surfeit of empathy – a killing empathy – that makes depressives great friends to everyone but themselves. Having a self is a rough business, and depressives can empathize with others who have to deal with it, but not with themselves.
For me, empathy is an existential question – it’s about the survival of the human race. That is, it’s imperative for us to overcome the challenges we face.
Ultimately, knowing God and reading the Word, it helps with patience with people, understanding, empathy and sympathy that they might not have that I have. If God gave it to me, why not exercise it?
I wouldn’t expect someone who’s been injured to hear my side until they felt that I had fully understood the depth of their pain.
I got a lot of empathy from my mother growing up, and I think it prevented me from ever really just writing people off.
I want us to organize, to tell the personal stories that create empathy, which is the most revolutionary emotion.
Kindness manifests in a lot of ways, such as acts of compassion, helpfulness, empathy, forgiveness, and caring. These gestures kindle and ignite feelings of love.
I don’t know if cinema can change society, but if it can make us show some empathy, that’s a good start.
Poets have to be sensitive to their audience, but it does not mean that they censor themselves. I realise my audience is diverse. Some will read with empathy and curiosity while others will take offense.
I would hesitate to tell people to stop being kind or sympathetic to sociopath. But just like loyalty, some things that can be taken advantage of are empathy, sympathy, and our tendency to pity somebody when something has gone wrong in their life.
I think that’s an incredible thing that we can do as actors – to feel empathy toward someone that you may otherwise detest, you know?
We miss extra bits of knowledge that can add value to our lives. We sort of lack empathy because we’re multitasking all the time.
Readers will stay with an author, no matter what the variations in style and genre, as long as they get that sense of story, of character, of empathetic involvement.
In empathy, you don’t speak at all. You speak with the eyes. You speak with your body. If you say any words at all, it’s because you are not sure you are with the person. So you may say some words. But the words are not empathy. Empathy is when the other person feels the connection with what’s alive in you.
I really feel that some people neglect and overlook compassion because they associate it with religion. Of course, everyone is free to choose whether they pay religion any regard, but to neglect compassion is a mistake because it is the source of our own well-being.
You can’t write about the past and ignore religion. It was such a fundamental, mind-shaping, driving force for pre-modern societies. I’m very interested in what religion does to us – its capacity to create love and empathy or hatred and violence.
It is human nature to imagine, to put yourself in another’s shoes. The past may be another country. But the only passport required is empathy.
I feel empathy for people who are trapped in a prison of self-consciousness in an uncomfortable way. We can be free, but we’re so held back. So perhaps that’s why I feel a duty to make my work. I feel liberated when I’m doing it, and I want other people to feel liberated through it.
Lady Justice doesn’t have empathy for anyone. She rules strictly based upon the law, and that’s really the only way that our system can function properly under the Constitution.
The purpose of human life is to serve, and to show compassion and the will to help others.
If we have optimism without empathy then it doesn’t matter how much we master the secrets of science. We’re not really solving problems, we’re just working on puzzles.
The more empathy you have and the more connected you are to society, the better off you’ll be.
We think empathy is innate, but it’s not. It’s a muscle you’re working.
I’m a citizen of the republic of empathy.
Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
‘Traveling While Black’ is about empathy, what African Americans experience in traveling throughout America, and how it hasn’t changed that much from the past. If it can be experienced in virtual reality, then perhaps some empathy can be gained.
It is through weakness and vulnerability that most of us learn empathy and compassion and discover our soul.
The state of empathy, or being empathic, is to perceive the internal frame of reference of another with accuracy and with the emotional components and meanings which pertain thereto as if one were the person.
Love is never giving up and yet a lot of surrender. Self-care. Truth. Trust. Openness. Growth. Courage. Faith. Collaboration. Compassion. Communication. Affection. Support. Passion. Joy. Warmth. Mindfulness. Rigorous self-work. Sympatico, empathy, flow. Forgiveness.
Self-compassion is key because when we’re able to be gentle with ourselves in the midst of shame, we’re more likely to reach out, connect, and experience empathy.
There are many qualities of a great leader. Passion is one, empathy is another, listening is another, decisiveness is another. I think a great leader makes people feel comfortable, so that they feel that they’re allowed to be stupid, they’re not afraid to give their opinions.
The struggle of my life created empathy… I could relate to pain… being abandoned… having people not love me.
Modern education is premised strongly on materialistic values. It is vital that when educating our children’s brains that we do not neglect to educate their hearts, a key element of which has to be the nurturing of our compassionate nature.
Peace equals ability to handle conflict, with empathy, nonviolence, and creativity.
My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style
‘Me too’ became a term that was both succinct and powerful, and it was a way to ring up immediate empathy between survivors.
The best mirror is an old friend.
If you want to be listened to, you should put in time listening.
Chris Guest has his own form. It’s a way of working that is really intense and you can commit a lot and you focus a lot. You get to bring a lot. You get to bring things maybe you haven’t seen before. You’re asked to care a great deal for these people who you’re playing and create heart and empathy.
I think the only productive way to approach characters, and frankly people in life, is through empathy. The minute we call someone a villain, we are choosing to part with empathy and that can be a slippery slope, both as an actor and a human being.
Whenever you feel like criticizing any one… just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.
So often our sisters comfort others when their own needs are greater than those being comforted. That quality is like the generosity of Jesus on the cross. Empathy during agony is a portion of divinity!
Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.
A fly rod extends a fly fisher’s being as surely as do imagination, empathy or prayer.
Why wouldn’t I help? What good reason do I have as a human being with power and a sense of empathy and morality, why wouldn’t I do something?
The most important thing in comedy – apart from empathy, which I think is important even if disguised – is surprise. I like surprising people with the fact that something’s even a joke at all.
I felt great empathy for the thousands of Americans who lost their home because of a system that failed them.
One result of moviemaking – and a side effect of moviegoing – is familiarity. If an actor is particularly good, familiarity opens into something deeper: care, concern, identification, empathy. Yet even those concepts can feel inadequate for some actors.
I like people who possess either deep mastery or deep empathy, but not as much as I like those who possess both.
Over the years, however, the research evidence keeps piling up, and it points strongly to the conclusion that a high degree of empathy in a relationship is possibly the most potent and certainly one of the most potent factors in bringing about change and learning.
Behavior is the mirror in which everyone shows their image.
Can we reach biosphere consciousness and global empathy in time to avert planetary collapse?
Some people naturally have a sense of empathy and an understanding of how to bring their followers to do things. They become great politicians.
Literature has done great work for feminism – writing and reading are a practice of empathy – and great literature will continue to do so.
I need voices of reason and of hysteria and of empathy. I need to have an Alanis moment. I need advice from Elizabeth Bennett. I need Tim Tams and comfort food.
Empathy takes time, and efficiency is for things, not people.
Reducing the economic gap may be impossible without also addressing the gap in empathy.
There is a real comfort with the position of the victim, which can either result in true empathy or deep paranoia.
If I see someone break down in tears, I don’t necessarily feel empathy for them in those moments unless it’s really warranted. I feel like a tear needs to be warranted in a movie; it needs to be earned.
Your presence is the most precious gift you can give to another human being.
All wars derive from lack of empathy: the incapacity of one to understand and accept the likeness or difference of another. Whether in nations or the encounters of race and sex, competition then replaces compassion, subjection excludes mutuality.
People of power have to show empathy and kindness to the young.
The silence of prayer is the silence of listening.
There’s a certain amount of empathy you need to have, and I’ve also never been one to call it in. I know some roles are easier for certain people, especially when there’s the sequel and a third and a fourth one.
I like reading novels because it provides insight into human behavior. I am really interested in feelings and think they are what define us as a species. When you really get it right in acting, it’s an act of empathy. You feel less distant from others, and that is really exciting.
Whenever you are about to find fault with someone, ask yourself the following question: What fault of mine most nearly resembles the one I am about to criticize?
Empathy doesn’t require that we have the exact same experiences as the person sharing their story with us…Empathy is connecting with the emotion that someone is experiencing, not the event or the circumstance.
I soak up personalities and energy. I can identify with anything because truthfully everything that makes up the world is characterized in some way in my family I feel, so my empathy is strong for mankind in general.
Turning a human being into a thing, an object, is almost always the first step towards justifying violence against that person. It is very difficult, perhaps impossible, to be violent to someone we think of as an equal, someone we have empathy with, but it is very easy to abuse a thing
President Reagan is a rhetorical roundheels, as befits a politician seeking empathy with his audience.
I had horrible acne when I was a kid. I felt like a complete and utter ne’er do well and someone who didn’t fit in and wasn’t handsome. So, I understand implicitly, and with a great amount of empathy, a man or human being that feels that way.
I think my biggest role as a parent is teaching empathy.
In the beginning was the relationship.
Machines are becoming devastatingly capable of things like killing. Those machines have no place for empathy. There’s billions of dollars being spent on that. Character robotics could plant the seed for robots that actually have empathy.
This enthusiasm [for empathy] may be misplaced. Empathy has some unfortunate features – it is parochial, narrow-minded and innumerate. We’re often at our best when we’re smart enough not to rely on it.
Performing is about developing empathy, which leads us to a broader view of the world and encourages us to develop compassion; so we can comfort each other and not be so brutal with each other.
A more courageous empathy is needed in our country to see the struggles of people from factory towns to farm towns to city towns who can’t even afford the rent in their cities anymore because costs are going so high.
We use a term called ’empowerment through empathy.’ And ‘Me Too’ is so powerful, because somebody had said it to me – right? – and it changed the trajectory of my healing process once I heard that.
Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.
When you have empathy toward your opponents, it helps you destroy them quicker. Because you understand exactly who they are. You understand what buttons to push. You understand if they’re insecure, if they fear embarrassment. And you can really hit those buttons to strike a nerve.
I’ve had my share, less than so many though, but enough to feel empathy. It’s tough and I see it so much on Earth, too much suffering. The loss of free will I find unacceptable – what most of us refer to as rights.
I’m cursed with empathy. I’m also by nature way too opinionated.
Empathy is the poor man’s cocaine, and love is just a chemical by any other name
Because I teach and write about depression and bipolar illness, I am often asked what is the most important factor in treating bipolar disorder. My answer is competence. Empathy is important, but competence is essential.
Empathy for the plight of the Goddess may be essential in seeing how to face our own plight on Earth.
The mob, when they are gazing at a dancer on the slack rope, naturally writhe and twist and balance their own bodies, as they see him do.
Empathy zooms you in on an individual and, as a result, it’s narrow, it’s innumerate, it’s racist, it’s very biased.
If you had a table spread for a feast, and was making merry with your friends, you would think it was kind to let me come and sit down and rejoice with you, because you’d think I should to share those good things; but I should better to share in your trouble and your labour.
Travel is the only way to get empathy for other people’s mindsets – to know their struggles and what they’re drawn to.
I have so much empathy for these young actors that are 19 and all of a sudden they’re beautiful and famous and rich. I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I’d be dead.’
I think one of my better gifts as a writer is empathy.
Not to him who is offensive to us are we most unfair, but to him who doth not concern us at all.
The solution to nearly every problem in the world comes down to greater awareness, compassion, and empathy.
Your empathy for other mothers is such a natural instinct and it’s such a beautiful thing that we all connect, and we should all help each other.
The right tools for solving disputes within our community are precision instruments such as reason, communication, empathy, curiosity, and understanding. They are also the right tools for building a global civilization of peace and prosperity.
The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.
As we tell stories about the lives of others, we learn how to imagine what another creature might feel in response to various events. At the same time, we identify with the other creature and learn something about ourselves.
Positive social emotions like compassion and empathy are generally good for us, and we want to encourage them. But do we know how to most reliably raise children to care about the suffering of other people? I’m not sure we do.
Clevelanders care about underdogs, partly because we are, partly because we have empathy, and we’re – we have faith in our God and faith in humanity, and that makes us support the underdog.
You really need to have a lot of empathy for the work you’re doing and the people who you’re ultimately trying to help, whether that’s a business colleague, a boss, or, ultimately, the user of the software you’re building.
The only way to combat hate is by demonstrating empathy and love.
If you just try to make rational arguments about why people should care about Congo and how 5 million people have died, then people tend not to be receptive. But once you’ve created a connection of empathy, rational arguments can play a supportive role.
Culture is not usually one of the criterion for personhood, but it has been argued that culture is sort of a medium for a lot of these criteria, such as empathy, and so on.
The realization that you’re not always standing down there on the field merely to win, to be successful, was very liberating. One can be successful by helping the team, the other players. All of a sudden I felt the kind of empathy for people that I hadn’t felt before.
It may be true in the case of autism that if you start off with a deficit in terms of empathy or mind reading, you’ve just got more time to devote to understanding the world by systemizing.
We often want the world to think we are strong and everything is perfect, when the reality is sometimes we are hurting and need a shoulder to cry on or just compassion or empathy.
Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.
The literary world is filled with good and generous people. But then that’s what writing is all about – empathy.
Empathy is important, openness, honesty, and an understanding for others.
Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don’t know and I don’t care.
So maybe part of our formal education should be training in empathy. Imagine how different the world would be if, in fact, that were ‘reading, writing, arithmetic, empathy.’
To me, a political song is also a personal song. Most political activism has been driven by empathy for other people and the desire for a world that’s less divisive. Even if songs aren’t overtly political, they can make a listener more empathetic.
It’s the hardest thing in the world to go on being aware of someone else’s pain.
Imagine what Ivanka Trump life has been like? She’s been eaten alive by the media. I have empathy for that.
I feel like songwriting is an experiment in empathy.
The idea of faking empathy to take a step forward to understanding – it’s a really powerful idea.
How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.
My wish list is pretty short. I wish that we had empathy. As a society, we are so wrapped up in our own artificial creations that we have become disconnected from one another and the wonder of our natural world. I truly believe that empathy is the key to solving the majority of our environmental and social problems.
Empathy in broadest sense refers to the reactions of one individual to the observed experiences of another
I feel like there is a real lack of empathy – not just in American society, it’s definitely happening in Britain as well – and it’s heartbreaking that people can see something and not feel it.
Because of empathy, stories of the suffering of one person could lead us into a war that could kill millions of people.
Listening, not imitation, may be the sincerest form of flattery.
The discoveries of how we can grow and the insights we need to have really come from the inside out. To have genuine empathy, not as a make-nice tool but as an understanding, is essential to the next step.
Empathy has some unfortunate features – it is parochial, narrow-minded, and innumerate. We’re often at our best when we’re smart enough not to rely on it.
Good politics starts with empathy, proceeds to analysis, then sets out values and establishes the vision, before getting to the nitty-gritty of policy solutions.
The whole idea of equal justice under law is completely incompatible with the idea of judges deciding cases according to “empathy”.
We give empathy to others for our own benefit.
Any man filled with empathy is capable of gaining valuable insights on the human condition through the suffering of others. You do not need to suffer to know suffering, but you need empathy first to identify and feel the suffering of others around you.
What goes on in the world and who’s defining what is right or wrong in anything? Is there a place in any of our existence where we need judgment any longer? But we should have empathy towards each other and break away from those categories that politics and religion keep throwing back at us.
When scoring a film, empathy is the key. And it is just as important to use music to express the actors’ emotions as it is to move the audience.
I think empathy is romantic. I think humor is romantic. Kindness is romantic. I think those kind of gestures of caring and love are romantic.
Empathy grows as we learn.
I don’t think there’s any reason in journalism not to approach stories we cover with humility, empathy, compassion, and intellectual openness. I mean, I think those are just important human traits. I don’t think that precludes scrutiny, negativity, where it’s appropriate.
If writing really is empathy, then understanding your place in society might actually help you achieve it.
People differ in where they direct their empathy and their compassion. Many people are intensely concerned about the suffering of non-human animals, and some do not care at all. There are cultural differences.
Remember there’s no such thing as a small act of kindness. Every act creates a ripple with no logical end.
You have to have sympathy for and an empathy with a character in order to play them.
Apathy is a sort of living oblivion.
The problem is, for men and women, the idea that sexuality is about dominance and submission, when, in fact, cooperation is a lot more fun, to put it my way. So some of it, a lot of it, is just about empathy.
Life is the first gift, love is the second, and understanding the third.
Masters points out that the heterosexuals were at a disadvantage, as they do not benefit from what he called “gender empathy”. Doing unto your partner as you would do unto yourself only works well when you’re gay.
Change begins with understanding and understanding begins by identifying oneself with another person: in a word, empathy. The arts enable us to put ourselves in the minds, eyes, ears and hearts of other human beings.
The emotions of the spectator will still be very apt to fall short of the violence of what is felt by the sufferer. Mankind, though naturally sympathetic, never conceive, for what has befallen another, that degree of passion which naturally animates the person principally concerned.
He came up straight to her father, whose hands he took and wrung without a word – holding them in his for a minute or two, during which time his face, his eyes, his look, told of more sympathy than could be put into words.
Yes, last year in interviewing. Empathy is when you repeat the last three words the patient says and nod your head.
Empathy comes from being empathized with.
Teaching the child to treat boundaries seriously teaches the child to respect the rights and needs of others. Thinking of another’s needs creates empathy.
As we learn to have compassion for ourselves, the circle of compassion for others – what and whom we can work with, and how – becomes wider.
I have empathy for the person who is being interviewed and written about with all kinds of misperceptions and misconceptions and flat-out lies. So I feel for them, I feel their pain. I know what that is like.
We all of us need to be toppled off the throne of self, my dear,” he said. “Perched up there the tears of others are never upon our own cheek.
Neuroscience has proven that similar areas of the brain are activated both in the person who suffers and in the one who feels empathy. Thus, empathic suffering is a true experience of suffering.
Empathy is the most mysterious transaction that the human soul can have, and it’s accessible to all of us, but we have to give ourselves the opportunity to identify, to plunge ourselves in a story where we see the world from the bottom up or through another’s eyes or heart.
I guess my point in general is that, if you look closely, who is in politics to self-identify – these are the people who flip easily, from right to left, pro-Muslim to anti-Muslim, etc. – versus who, whether on the right or left, is moved by genuine interest and empathy.
Looking at various means of developing compassion, I think empathy is an important factor: the ability to appreciate others’ suffering.
I think one of the biggest political failures, and the biggest social failures, over the past few years has been the failure of empathy; not being able to look at the other person down the street.
Acting is probably the only profession where you are relying only on empathy.
Watching the news, there seems to be an empathy failure and miscommunication.
Books by women, people of color, LGBTQ authors, differently abled people, and non-Americans are a great way of broadening horizons and building empathy.
James, you are all the family I have. I would die for you. You know that. I would die without you. If it were not for you, I would be dead a hundred times over these past five years. I owe you everything, and if you cannot believe I have empathy, perhaps you might at least believe I know honor–honor, and debt–
It has been a period where people have been far nicer to one another in every possible way. I’m not saying it’s because we’re dropping our empathy that we’re nicer to each other, just that the drop doesn’t seem to be causing any harm.
There should be characters and situations that we cannot identify with, that retain either too much horror or too much wonder to allow for simple identification. That feels to me like an accurate depiction of what it is like to be in the world, rather than a neutered register of continual empathy.
Human beings are created with empathy. Art serves that purpose. So why should I be disinterested in a character who’s a man, and why should a man shy away from a show that’s female-driven?
For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.
What people get admired and appreciated for in community are their soft skills: their sense of humor and timing, their ability to listen, their courage and honesty, their capacity for empathy.
I think it’s a stereotype that soldiers don’t talk, because my experience is that they will talk if they are met with empathy and no judgment.
None of us can choose where we shall love.
My goal with ‘Beyond’ is really to create a strong sense of empathy between the player and Jodie Holmes.
Once you’re playing someone, you shouldn’t be judging them in any way. That’s what being an actor is – it’s having empathy for people that are different from yourself. Once you’ve committed to that person, your responsibility is to tell that story.
Remember, empathy need not lead to sympathetically giving in to the other side’s demands—knowing how someone feels does not mean agreeing with them.
Real dialogue is where two or more people become willing to suspend their certainty in each other’s presence.
Whether it’s a song or a television show, or a book or poem, art is the thing that cracks me open and encourages me to go on a deeper journey to find my own compassion and empathy and humanity.
Without television and mass communication, that knowledge wouldn’t exist. So I think it actually has the possibility of turning people into more understanding and more empathetic people.
Competitiveness is just as much a part of our nature as empathy. The ideal, in my view, is a democratic system with a social market economy, because it takes both tendencies into account.
Know how to listen, and you will profit even from those who talk badly.
Sympathy is what you have for someone after they die, pity you have for someone when they don’t have a date to the biggest dance of the year. Empathy is what I do to you when you judge me. Envy is having pity on yourself. Can you discern the rest for yourself?
Writing, or at least good writing, is an outgrowth of that urge to use language to communicate complex ideas and experiences between people. And that’s true whether you’re reading Shakespeare or bad vampire fiction-reading is always an act of empathy. It’s always an imagining of what it’s like to be someone else.
Competing in pageants made me hyper-aware of the unfair expectations society places on women in terms of youth and beauty. But it also gave me empathy for women who use beauty as a creative exploration. When expressed healthfully, dressing up, doing hair, crafting makeup, etc., is an art form.
Silence has been destroyed, but also the idea that it’s important to learn how another person thinks, to enter the mind of another person. The whole idea of empathy is gone. We are now part of this giant machine where every second we have to take out a device and contribute our thoughts and opinions.
When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand.
There is something human about the way people react to and identify with suffering. There’s a lot more empathy in the world than we perhaps realize.
Empathy is one of our greatest tools of business that is most underused.
Stories teach us empathy. They reveal to us ourselves in the skins of others.
The purpose of civilization and growth is to be able to reach out and empathize with other people… For me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy.
We shall listen, not lecture; learn, not threaten. We will enhance our safety by earning the respect of others and showing respect for them. In short, our foreign policy will rest on the traditional American values of restraint and empathy, not on military might.
I always think that if you look at anyone in detail, you will have empathy for them because you recognize them as a human being, no matter what they’ve done.
Photography is an empathy towards the world.
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
Anyone who has experienced a certain amount of loss in their life has empathy for those who have experienced loss.
Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet. Because,ultimately, the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated.
Good company and good discourse are the very sinews of virtue.
Real social progress is always a widening of the circle of concern and protection. It’s respect and empathy overtaking blindness and indifference. It’s understanding that by the true measure, we are all neighbors and countrymen, call to each one of us to know what is right and kind and just and to go and do likewise.
Rather than seeing dreams as containing hidden messages, see dreams as experiences of empathy. Then use empathy with the dream to reconnect with the experience of dreaming itself.
