Best 1068 quotes in «empathy quotes» category

Often, instead of offering empathy, we have a strong urge to give advice or reassurance and to explain our own position or feeling.

Once you've created a connection of empathy, rational arguments can play a supportive role.

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.

One must have the humility and the imagination to honor all deep human experiences - not least those one has never come near to sharing.

One of the most painful aspects of suffering is the loneliness of it. Others may offer support or empathy, but no one can walk the road to Moriah in our place.

Our ability to turn off empathy for specific kinds of humans and then use faulty logic to justify our beliefs is messily sociopathic.

Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.

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.

Other-oriented feelings congruent with the perceived welfare of another person.

Our leaders are cruel because only those willing to be inordinately cruel and remorseless can hold positions of leadership in the foreign policy establishment. People capable of expressing a full human measure of compassion and empathy toward faraway powerless strangers do not become president of the United States, or vice president, or secretary of state, or national security adviser or secretary of the treasury. Nor do they want to.

Our goal is to create a quality of empathic connection that allows everyone's needs to be met.

Photography is an empathy towards the world.

Pain shared is pain lessened; joy shared is joy increased. Thus do we refute entropy.

People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.

People with antisocial personality disorders aren't automatically bad - they simply approach the world with a more ruthless set of lenses. The lack of empathy or very weak empathy and the ability to read other people's weak spots can be a flammable combination when you get in the way of something they want. But they aren't a different species. They're a part of our spectrum.

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.

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.

People don't listen to understand. They listen to reply. The collective monologue is everyone talking and no one listening.

Playwriting is all about empathy, getting inside the head of someone who is not you, to think like they think without judging them.

Powerful is our need to be known, really known by ourselves and others, even if only for a moment.

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.

Productive collaborations between family and school, therefore, will demand that parents and teachers recognize the critical importance of each other's participation in the life of the child. This mutuality of knowledge, understanding, and empathy comes not only with a recognition of the child as the central purpose for the collaboration but also with a recognition of the need to maintain roles and relationships with children that are comprehensive, dynamic, and differentiated.

President Reagan is a rhetorical roundheels, as befits a politician seeking empathy with his audience.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Real empathy is sometimes not insisting that it will be okay but acknowledging that it is not.

seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another, and feeling with the heart of another.

Remember there's no such thing as a small act of kindness. Every act creates a ripple with no logical end.

Reducing the economic gap may be impossible without also addressing the gap in empathy.

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.

Republicans rarely criticize Obama for lack of empathy - in part because liberals have traditionally been seen as standing up for the weak and the vulnerable. Conservatives can be just as empathetic. But they believe that, in most cases, it's not government's role to be the primary dispenser of empathy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Some people naturally have a sense of empathy and an understanding of how to bring their followers to do things. They become great politicians.

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.

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.'

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.

Staying with empathy we allow speakers to touch deeper levels of themselves.

Speciesism is a failure to empathize with those outside one's group. In general, speciesists simply disregard the myriad nonhumans whom humans intentionally hurt and kill. Who cares if millions of mice and rats are vivisected? They're 'only rodents'. What does it matter if billions of chickens live in misery until they die in pain and fear? They're 'just chickens'. They aren't human, so they don't count. Victimizers lack empathy for their victims, but absence of empathy doesn't justify victimization, whether the victims are human or nonhuman.

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.

Steven Pinker says, the invention of printing and the widespread appearance of fiction - this taught empathy. If you read a novel, you're in someone else's head, in three, five different people's heads. Suddenly, the principle of "Don't do anything to anyone that you wouldn't want done to you" becomes real in people's minds. That's a fantastic achievement if fiction is indeed partly responsible for it. That's a great thing to be a part of. In the end, then, I don't know if writers have legislated, but they have civilized.

That this is the source of our fellow-feeling for the misery of others, that it is by changing places in fancy with the sufferer, that we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels, may be demonstrated by many obvious observations, if it should not be thought sufficiently evident of itself. When we see a stroke aimed and just ready to fall upon the leg or arm of another person, we naturally shrink and draw back our own leg or our own arm; and when it does fall, we feel it in some measure, and are hurt by it as well as the sufferer.

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.

Suffering and joy teach us, if we allow them, how to make the leap of empathy, which transports us into the soul and heart of another person.

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.