Best 1068 quotes in «empathy quotes» category

If you desire to gaze out over wide vistas, you do well to climb up to a high spot. But if you wish to gaze into the human heart, you must climb down and look from a low place.

If you don’t teach that dog to sit, she’s going to die!” said the tall bearded man in blue jeans standing next to me. He pointed at the ground, bent down to get in Belvy’s face, and bellowed at her, “SIT!!” To my astonishment, Belvy sat. She didn’t just sit, she pounded her butt into the pavement, and looked up at the man wagging her tail. The man was in my face now. “See? It’s not mean, it’s clear.” The light changed, and the man strode across the street, leaving me with words to live by.

If you happen to hold that human consciousness is no more than the epiphenomenon, or secretion, of our individual brains then you are more or less trapped in your own skull. But if consciousness is open, if it can partake in a more global form of being, if it can merge with the natural world and with other beings, then, indeed, it may be possible to drop, for a time, the constraints of one's personal worldview and see reality through the eyes of others.

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 like to share those good things; but I should like better to share in your trouble and your labour.

If you have the power to hit people over the head whenever you want, you don’t have to trouble yourself too much figuring out what they think is going on, and therefore, generally speaking, you don’t. Hence the sure-fire way to simplify social arrangements, to ignore the incredibly complex play of perspectives, passions, insights, desires, and mutual understandings that human life is really made of, is to make a rule and threaten to attack anyone who breaks it. This is why violence has always been the favored recourse of the stupid: it is the one form of stupidity to which it is almost impossible to come up with an intelligent response. It is also of course the basis of the state.

If you've been on this side, then you'll have more compassion and understanding for those still on this side when you get to the other side, because you know how it feels like to be on this side. Sometimes though, relief comes too sudden and good that we tend to lose our sense of empathy for those still on this side, and it's amazing how we've forgotten so soon how it felt like to be on this side. How would it have felt if you were treated the same way you treat those who are on this side by those who were on the other side, when you were still on this side, now that you are on the other side?

If you truly have compassion in your heart, show it by keeping your doubts to yourself and sharing your hope with those who love change!

If you want more kindness in the world, put some there.

I had a dream that I was in someone else’s shoes for once…they were the wrong size.

I had observed that neurotypicals criticised autistic people for lacking empathy… but seldom made any effort to improve their own empathy towards autistic people. Pg 318

I hate the assumption that you can't write about something because you haven't experienced it, and not just because it assumes a limit on the human imagination, which is basically limitless. It also suggests that some leaps of identification are impossible. I refuse to accept that, because it leads to the conclusion that real change is beyond us, and so is empathy.

I hate it too,” Violet said, and Klaus looked at his older sister with relief. Sometimes, just saying that you hate something, and having someone agree with you, can make you feel better about a terrible situation.

I'll put it on my table where I keep my drawings," Hassan said. His saying that made me kind of sad. Sad for who Hassan was, where he lived. For how he'd accepted the fact that he'd grow old in that mud shack in the yard, the way his father had.

I keep thinking about the fragmented quality of human awareness: You take your blindness for granted most of the time then suddenly it stuns you: how little you see as you plunge ahead from minute to minute, day to day, year to year - vision cut down to the arc of a flickering flashlight, never sure how your words and acts are affecting someone else because you never really see that someone as he is. I know we should find even the most serene life unendurable were we to possess to any real degree those extrasensory perceptions which our grandmothers believed in...

I know you want me to feel some sympathy for them, but that's not who I am. I care only about those I know, and even then, not all that deeply. Strangers get nothing from me.

I’m a feeler. I feel everything deep within my core. Even when I don’t want to. I don’t know where my emotions stop and my empathy begins. I feel from the tips of my toes to the follicles of my head. I feel with every fiber, every molecule, every tissue, marrow, muscle, and bone in my body. I feel.

I'm never satisfied with what I give. I always feel the need to give more and to do more.

I’m helped by a gentle notion from Buddhist psychology, that there are “near enemies” to every great virtue—reactions that come from a place of care in us, and which feel right and good, but which subtly take us down an ineffectual path. Sorrow is a near enemy to compassion and to love. It is borne of sensitivity and feels like empathy. But it can paralyze and turn us back inside with a sense that we can’t possibly make a difference. The wise Buddhist anthropologist and teacher Roshi Joan Halifax calls this a “pathological empathy” of our age. In the face of magnitudes of pain in the world that come to us in pictures immediate and raw, many of us care too much and see no evident place for our care to go. But compassion goes about finding the work that can be done. Love can’t help but stay present

. . . I'm not pretty, not close up anyway. Generally, the closer people get to me the less hot they find me.

I'm not interested in whether you've stood with the great; I'm interested in whether you've sat with the broken.

I'm too intense. I feel too much. And when I experience certain sensations, I act. Even if the situation is one I should probably walk away from. But you know what?" She was feeling a little better. "I'm never going to walk away, not from any of it. I can't. I am what I am. I'm intense, just as my fiance said. I feel everything around me, and I'm glad about that. I can't imagine life without the depth, without the magic that accompanies the pain.

I’m so sorry,” he said, because after Pamela died, he promised himself that if anyone told him the smallest, saddest story, he would answer, I’m so sorry. Meaning, Yes, that happened. You couldn't believe the people who believed that not mentioning sadness was a kind of magic that could stave off the very sadness you didn't mention – as though grief were the opposite of Rumpelstiltskin and materialized only at the sound of its own name.

In a world spoiled by the obituary of attention and the dormancy of empathy, people are coming up short of authentic emotion. (“The upper lip must never tremble”)

In Data Science if you want to help individuals, be empathetic and ask questions; that way, you can begin to understand their journey, too.

In many cases, it was the woman’s stomach—not her heart—that fell for her man.

In every sphere of social interaction, that hermeneutic leap—that ability to put yourself in the mind frame of the other—is a virtue and a blessing.

In meditation, you train your body to be still and your mind to slow down and focus on a point of concentration.

In quieting our ambition on occasion to concentrate on empathy and friendship we are still investing in ourselves and we diminish the likelihood of minor ailments, increase our lifespan and improve our capacity to fight disease.

In my view, compassion takes empathy to another level. With compassion, there is an internal calling to move empathy into action. Compassion is love in action.

In return, Giovanni told me that empathizing Italians say L'ho provato sulla mia pelle, which means 'I have experienced that on my own skin.' Meaning, I have also been burned or scarred in this way, and I know exactly what you're going through.

In one brain imaging study, psychology professor Matthew Lieberman of the University of California, Los Angeles, found that when people are shown photos of faces expressing strong emotion, the brain shows greater activity in the amygdala, the part that generates fear. But when they are asked to label the emotion, the activity moves to the areas that govern rational thinking. In other words, labeling an emotion—applying rational words to a fear—disrupts its raw intensity.

In place of fellow feeling, seeing each other alone, is enough to raise the empathy of human beings.

I noticed that religion gave some people a way to escape dealing with the world: “Things will be better when you die,” the people of my grandma’s generation said as they worked themselves to death. “God wants you to forgive and love those who do you wrong,” some people said to shake off the shame of being unable to respond to the abuse they endured. The holier-than-thou faction found comfort in believing, “The rest of y’all are lost because you don’t have a personal relationship with God—our God.” But art engages you in the world, not just the world around you but the big world, and not just the big world of Tokyo and Sydney and Johannesburg, but the bigger world of ideas and concepts and feelings of history and humanity.

In some rare cases, a friendship between two people benefits both of them, and what’s more, in some rarer cases, it benefits both of them equally.

In social life we hardly stop to consider how much of that daring spirit which gives mastery comes from hardness of heart rather than from high purpose, or true courage. The man who succumbs to his wife, the mother who succumbs to her daughter, the master who succumbs to his servant, is as often brought to servility by a continual aversion to the giving of pain, by a softness which causes the fretfulness of others to be an agony to himself,—as by any actual fear which the firmness of the imperious one may have produced. There is an inner softness, a thinness of the mind's skin, an incapability of seeing or even thinking of the troubles of others with equanimity, which produces a feeling akin to fear; but which is compatible not only with courage, but with absolute firmness of purpose, when the demand for firmness arises so strongly as to assert itself.

In some cases, it is the woman’s stomach—not her heart—that has left her man for another.

Io non posso abituarmi a vivere in un mondo dove l'ascolto ha un prezzo, non posso delegarlo a una categoria professionale.

In the process of becoming conscious beings, we eventually come back around again and again to the ideas of compassion, caring, and empathy.

In this world where too many are willing to see only the light that is visible, never the Light Invisible, we have a daily darkness that is night, and we encounter another darkness from time to time that is death, the deaths of those we love, but the third and most constant darkness is with us everyday, at all hours of every day, is the darkness of the mind, the pettiness and meanness and hatred, which we have invited into ourselves, and which we pay out with generous interest.

I realized that it is these two things that staying with regrets offers: It can become the seed of compassion and empathy so that you can stand in the shoes of other people because you'er feeling exactly what they feel. And it spurs you on to help people in the future rather than hurt them.

I realized that it is these two things that staying with regrets offers: It can become the seed of compassion and empathy so that you can stand in the shoes of other people because you're feeling exactly what they feel. And it spurs you on to help people in the future rather than hurt them.

In the last 10 years, we have seen a rise in selfishness: selfies, self-absorbed people, superficiality, self-degradation, apathy, and self-destruction. So I challenge all of you to take initiative to change this programming. Instead of celebrating the ego, let's flip the script and celebrate the heart. Let's put the ego and celebrity culture to sleep, and awaken the conscience. This is the battle we must all fight together to win back our humanity. To save our future and our children.

In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.

I realized I could only play-act at the spiritual life as long as my appetites were stronger than my empathy.

I see the world as one big nation where everyone in it is a citizen. So it is our collective responsibility to make it better in every little way that we can.

I squeeze my eyes shut and practice being not seen. I open one eye. “Well? Can you see me?” “Yes, Bob, I can see you.” She said my name. Bob. It makes me feel … well, seen. And heard. Like I’m a person. Or whatever I am. I’m glad I’m not invisible after all.

...It also taught me that while cruelty can be fun for a few moments, compassion has a much longer shelf life.

I suspect that 'Kindness and Cruelty' and 'Mercy and Justice' all have secret affairs, as though they rendezvous only within certain sophisticated souls: those who hate being offensive, but love telling the truth.

[The answer of Solon to the question 'Which is the most perfect popular government?'] That where the least injury done to the meanest individual, is considered as an insult on the whole constitution.

The quality you most admire in a man? Courage moral and physical: 'anima'—the ability to think like a woman. Also a sense of the absurd. 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.