Best 1068 quotes in «empathy quotes» category

When we focus on others, our world expands.

When were you born, who are your parents, where did you grow up? None of us earns these things. These things were given to us. So when we strip away all of our luck and our privilege, and we consider where we'd be without them, it becomes much easier to see someone who's poor and say, "That could be me." And that's empathy.

When you are born without the ordinary feelings and emotions shared by most other human beings, life looks different to you. It seems at times like a movie you’re walking through, more a spectator than a participant. There is above all a lack of empathy with most of mankind, a sense of detachment. But with detachment comes perspective. The less you care, the more you know, and the more you know the less you care.

When you are deeply contemplative, you listen more carefully and understand things which cannot be articulated.

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.

When you hear about what someone else is going through, and you are unable to distance yourself from it or in any way muzzle your empathy and are inspired to actually do something, these are moments to learn from.

When you listen with empathy to another person, you give that person psychological air.

When you need empathy, you cannot give empathy.

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.

When you start to develop your powers of empathy and imagination, the whole world opens up to you.

When you talk about a reader being emotionally moved, a feeling of empathy, I think that comes out of that line-by-line respect for reader. That's actually where it all comes from.

When you start getting into your politics it's like you have to be vulnerable and you have to be sort of sensitive. Because if it's always like straight aggression all the time, there becomes no empathy for the stance that you're taking. You're not telling people to think, you're telling them what to think. And also you have to be honest with yourself on that, too.

When you write about people three dimensionally, it inspires a sense of empathy. That would be something that I want people to take away from all my writing, a feeling of emotionality, connection, and empathy.

Without exception, empathy is always appropriate.

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?

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.

Women's networks are a necessary part of life. A mixture of empathy and brainstorming can move mountains.

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.

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.

Writing is an act of empathy. You are occupying and understanding a point of view that might be alien to your own--and work is often the keyhole through which you peer.

Writing a poem is a lesson in the truest empathy. And to truly have empathy is to truly know power, or at least the only kind of power I’m interested in.

Writing really evokes empathy in a way very few things can do.

Yehudi Menuhin was a citizen of the world in the fullest sense - one whose vision and culture gave him a deep empathy with fellow human beings of every creed and color.

You can be right or you can have empathy. You can't do both.

Yes, last year in interviewing. Empathy is when you repeat the last three words the patient says and nod your head.

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.

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.

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.

You need to indoctrinate empathy out of people in order to arrive at extreme capitalist positions.

ADRIANA They can be meek that have no other cause. A wretched soul, bruised with adversity, We bid be quiet when we hear it cry; But were we burden’d with like weight of pain, As much, or more, we should ourselves complain: So thou, that hast no unkind mate to grieve thee, With urging helpless patience wouldst relieve me; But, if thou live to see like right bereft, This fool-begg’d patience in thee will be left.

Your presence is the most precious gift you can give to another human being.

A compassionate government does not need to pay too much attention to those who don't have needs. True leadership is to fulfill a need of the needy. People who have needs need attention indeed! Be a true leader!

Affliction equips the suffering to empathize with others in anguish and not only does it strengthen them, it enables them to be consoling comforters in a world full of hurt.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.

5. As you know, your thoughts determine the outcome of your behaviour. If you truly desire inner peace and relief from the busyness of your day, set your intention by quietly saying to yourself, “I am here to be still, calm, and clear my head.

A funeral is like a little game, really. You have to just play along and say the right thing and behave the right way until it’s over. Be pleasant but don’t smile too much; be sad but don’t overdo it or the family will feel worse than they already do. Be hopeful but don’t let your optimism be taken as a lack of empathy or an inability to deal with the reality. Because if anybody was to be truly honest there would be a lot of arguments, finger-pointing, tears, snot, and screaming.

[A] great novel will allow you to transcend the social, racial and political limitations imposed by the vicissitudes of life and to find a deep fraternity based on empathy.

A good actor,' said Sunay in a light theatrical tone, 'is a man who represents the sediment, the unexplored and unexplained powers that have drifted down the centuries. He takes the lessons he has gleaned and hides them deep inside himself. His self-mastery is awesome; never does he bare his heart; no one may know how powerful he is until he enters on to the stage. All his life, he travels down unfamiliar roads, to perform at the most out-of-the-way theatres in the most godforsaken town, and everywhere he goes, he searches for a voice that will grant him genuine freedom. If he is so fortunate as to find that voice, he must embrace it fearlessly and follow it to the end.

Ah! candid and unadulterated mind! you have learned early to reflect; but take care lest this habit, hitherto so well applied, should totally unfit you for society. It will strew thorns in your path, while other young women of your age seek only flowers. By imagining yourself in the place of others, as you now continually do, you will learn to feel for all the unhappy, or even for those who appear so; whereas it might save a great deal of (for the most part useless) pain, if you could contrive to feel only for yourself.

A lack of empathy is a defining characteristic of the sociopath.

All that we can't say is all we need to hear.

Algernon is so smart he has to solve a problem with a lock that changes every time he goes in to eat so he has to lern something new to get his food. That made me sad because if he coulnt lern he wouldnt be able to eat and he would be hungry.

A legend of the desert tells the story of a man who wanted to move to another oasis, and began to load up his camel. He piled on his rugs, his cooking utensils, his trunks of clothes -and the animal accepted it all. As they were leaving, the man remembered a beautiful blue feather his father had given him. He retrieved it and placed it on the camel's back. With that, the animal collapsed of the weight and died. “My camel couldn't even bear the weight of a feather,” the man must have thought. Sometimes we think the same of others -without understanding that our little joke may have been the drop that caused the goblet of suffering to overflow.

All men are born firstly with the instinct to protect themselves. But few grow to really love themselves, and even fewer learn to love their neighbor as themselves.

Am I sitting here now, months later, in Los Angeles, writing all this down, because I want my life to matter? Maybe so. But I don't want it to matter more than others. I want to remember, or to learn, how to live as if it matters, as if they all matter, even if they don't.

A marijuana high can enhance core human mental abilities. It can help you to focus, to remember, to see new patterns, to imagine, to be creative, to introspect, to empathically understand others, and to come to deep insights. If you don’t find this amazing you have lost your sense of wonder. Which, by the way, is something a high can bring back, too.

Alone, [Chamcha] all at once remembered that he and Pamela had once disagreed, as they disagreed on everything, on a short-story they’d both read, whose theme was precisely the nature of the unforgivable. Title and author eluded him, but the story came back vividly. A man and a woman had been intimate friends (never lovers) for all their adult lives. On his twenty-first birthday (they were both poor at the time) she had given him, as a joke, the most horrible, cheap glass vase she could find, in colours a garish parody of Venetian gaiety. Twenty years later, when they were both successful and greying, she visited his home and quarrelled with him over his treatment of a mutual friend. In the course of the quarrel her eye fell upon the old vase, which he still kept in pride of place on his sitting-room mantelpiece, and, without pausing in her tirade, she swept it to the floor, crushing it beyond hope of repair. He never spoke to her again; when she died, half a century later, he refused to visit her deathbed or attend her funeral, even though messengers were sent to tell him that these were her dearest wishes. ‘Tell her,’ he said to the emissaries, 'that she never knew how much I valued what she broke.’ The emissaries argued, pleaded, raged. If she had not known how much meaning he had invested in the trifle, how could she in all fairness be blamed? And had she not made countless attempts, over the years, to apologize and atone? And she was dying, for heaven’s sake; could not this ancient, childish rift be healed at last? They had lost a lifetime’s friendship; could they not even say goodbye? 'No,’ said the unforgiving man. – 'Really because of the vase? Or are you concealing some other, darker matter?’ – 'It was the vase,’ he answered, 'the vase, and nothing but.’ Pamela thought the man petty and cruel, but Chamcha had even then appreciated the curious privacy, the inexplicable inwardness of the issue. 'Nobody can judge an internal injury,’ he had said, 'by the size of the superficial wound, of the hole.

A long list of propositions does not necessarily make a coherent argument

An accurate accent is powerful because it is the ultimate gesture of empathy. It connects you to another person's culture in a way that words never can, because you have bent your body as well as your mind to match that person's culture. Anyone can learn "bawn-JURE" in a few seconds. To learn how bonjour fits your companion's mouth and tongue; to learn how to manipulate the muscles, the folds, and even the texture of your throat and lips to match your companion's -- this is an unmistakable, undeniable, and irresistable gesture of care.

And another local journalist wrote an op-ed wondering if this trend of empathy had gone too far. Wondering if this trend of empathy had gone too far? To erase the possibility of empathy is also to erase the possibility of understanding.