Best 1068 quotes in «empathy quotes» category

Hearing has consequences. When I truly hear a person and the meanings that are important to him at that moment, hearing not simply his words, but him, and when I let him know that I have heard his own private personal meanings, many things happen. There is first of all a grateful look. He feels released. He wants to tell me more about his world. He surges forth in a new sense of freedom. He becomes more open to the process of change. I have often noticed that the more deeply I hear the meanings of the person, the more there is that happens. Almost always, when a person realize he has been deeply heard, his eyes moisten. I think in some real sense he is weeping for joy. It is as though he were saying, "Thank God, somebody heard me. Someone knows what it's like to be me.

He can’t tell if Hal is sad. He is having a harder and harder time reading Hal’s mind or whether he’s in good spirits. This worries him. He used to be able to sort of pre-verbally know in his stomach generally where Hal was and what he was doing, even if Hal was far away and playing or if Mario was away, and now he can’t anymore. Feel it. This worries him and feels like when you’ve lost something important in a dream and you can’t even remember what it was but it’s important. Mario loves Hal so much it makes his heart beat hard. He doesn’t have to wonder if the difference now is him or his brother because Mario never changes.

He'd always known that shit rolled downhill, but he never knew tears did the same thing.

Help your child see others' emotions as well as experiencing his or her own without imposing your judgment.

Here we are, you and I, and I hope that Christ makes a third with us. No one can interrupt us now... So come now, dearest friend, reveal your heart and speak your mind." (p. 29)

Her father dropped her off in front of the place where she was to live and left the engine running. Lila Mae removed the two suitcases from the back of the pickup truck. The suitcases were new, with a formidable casing of green plastic. Scratchproof, supposedly. Her father had only been able to afford them because they were, manufacturer's oats aside, scratched — gouged actually, as if an animal had taken them in its fangs to teach them about hubris.

He was thinking, no doubt, that this man, whose name is Jean Valjean, had his misfortune only too vividly present in his mind; that the best thing was to divert him from it, and to make him believe, if only momentarily, that he was a person like any other, by treating him just in his ordinary way. Is not this indeed, to understand charity well?

He who has little problems, shows little love. He who has overcome huge problems, has giant love. Because he understands what it means and won’t have others suffer like he did.

Hey. You heard what Rock said. I know how you feel. We can help you shoulder this" "Do you really?" Rlain said. "Do you actually know how I feel, Kaladin Stormblessed? Or is that simply a thing that men say?" "I guess it's a thing men say," Kaladin admitted, then pulled over an upside-down bucket for himself. "Can you tell me how it feels?

His face had been twisted into an expression of every agony he had imagined for his friend.

His feelings were too much for speech, and suddenly he broke down.

How convenient it is to declare that everything is totally ugly within the habit of the époque, rather than applying oneself to extract from it the dark and cryptic beauty, however faint and invisible it is.

Hope becomes an option only when we get involved. Empathy must influence the nature of our interactions. And we must remember that compassion is contagious. The more we spread it, the more the people around us are gonna feel it and cherish it. And the more we see it elsewhere, the more it becomes attainable where we are.

How does one develop compassion for someone with a completely different set of values without reading something from their point of view? Books are one of the ways in which we can truly get into the heads of people we would never meet in our ordinary lives and travel to countries we would otherwise never visit.

How did I learn empathy? I learned it while suffering. How did I learn about karma? Because it came back to me and I deserved it. I now know when any hurt I experience is due to circumstances outside of my control, karma, or self-imposed consequences for foolish choices. I do feel justice is served if karma humbles someone who needs it, and as anyone who has been wronged can attest, what they seem to want most is for the offending party to experience how it feels and to know in that moment exactly what they did to someone else and to be filled with remorse and hopefully, repentance.

How much of assumed national and personal character comes from the fact that we have never truly known need to the point of having our character tested? Willing conscientious objectors underwent controlled starvation and confirmed how quickly it impacts the initiative and generosity we like to think of as "American" characteristics.

How is it possible that suffering that is neither my own nor of my concern should immediately affect me as though it were my own, and with such force that is moves me to action?

How often have our own tears blinded us to the tears of others.

Humans are unique in having the astonishing capacity to extend our sympathies far beyond the here and now. through time and space, to anywhere and anything we choose. It is our culture that decides how large and inclusive our moral circle is, but it is each of us who makes up our culture. (p.250)

Humans have long since possessed the tools for crafting a better world. Where love, compassion, altruism and justice have failed, genetic manipulation will not succeed.

Humans pursuing deep, complete connections respond to quite different incentives from those that influence self-interested utility maximizers. Rewards, monitoring, and punishments are less likely to be effective than engagement, communication, norms, socialization, identity, and common purpose. They share not out of a calculation of reciprocity but from a psychological pleasure in sharing. Those seeking connections make decisions from their hearts as well as their heads, influenced by emotion, fairness, empathy, and intuition. Their behavior, thoughts, feelings, and even personal attributes are highly socially contingent. The range of humanity includes individuals who display every possible combination of selfishness and sociability.

Humility helps us come to terms with what we cannot know. Patience takes the edge off when the hurt continues. Empathy is the gift that connects us with others. Forgiving ourselves for having such perfectly human reactions is harder than forgiving whatever caused them.

Hurting someone will not impress them. Intelligence requires empathy to work. Water is wet. The sky is pink through these rose-tinted glasses.

I always wondered what it must be like to lose a twin—if somehow Mary felt it like it was happening to her. If she felt physical pain.

Humans seem to have a really hard time learning from their own mistakes. History is often forgotten, warnings from the past not heeded. But we do enjoy a good story or two. So how about learning from the future? Jew-ish Sci-Fi is a prophetic genre. Lot’s of people write in it. Lot’s of people enjoy reading it…even the ones who focus on werebears…

I am an artist, and a rebel one at that. I live in the voluptuous dimension of imagination, so if you're expecting normalcy (dullness) from me, sorry to disappoint, but you're quite mistaken. Ordinary is not my best attire, I've tried it and normal just never fit quite right. I will always be the crazy one who believes in magic, unicorns and impossible dreams. But also love, compassion and empathy.

I am because I feel.

I am not an ornithologist—I am a bird.

I am not an atheist. But the religion that I do advocate is not of the Bible, Vedas, Quran or any other scripture. The religion I speak of, is what Christ talked about, it is what Buddha talked about, it is the religion of plain everyday kindness.

I am not sure that you can be taught how to love. In many ways it is innate - just watch and see what small child effortlessly does. But you can be invited to it and reminded of it.

I am noticing a big difference in the way the hospital workers are looking at me as I approach Jess’s room. The look of sincere sympathy that used to be on their faces when they made eye contact with me is gone. It has been replaced by shear helplessness as they quickly walk past me with their heads tilted down and to the right. I feel like Bud Fox walking into his office with the Securities and Exchange Commission awaiting him.

I believe in love. I believe it transforms, transports, and transcends. I believe it fine-tunes goodness, solidifies strength, ripens resolve, eradicates rage, alleviates stress, and elevates empathy.

I believe a stronger sense of empathy would tilt the balance of our current politics in favor of those people who are struggling in this society. After all if they are like us, then their struggles are our own. If we fail to help we diminish ourselves.

I believe that compassion is the key to our evolution as a species.

I can empathize with characters. Real people are harder. Real people don’t have concise character arcs.

I can feel for anyone that is unjustly treated...and I can feel for those that injure them too.

I came to recognise that, apart from her [Françoise's] own kinsfolk, the sufferings of humanity inspired in her a pity which increased in direct ratio to the distance separating the sufferers from herself.

I couldn’t even tell if I had any sadness of my own, because I was so full of Abuelita’s sadness.

I can’t look people in the eye and tell them that they’re going to die anymore.

I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs. You refer to yourself in order to understand other people. That's the novelist's gift, isn't it?

I don't blame you one iota for feeling as you do. If I were you I would undoubtedly feel just as you do."(...) You can say that and be 100 percent sincere, because if you were the other person you, of course, would feel just as he does (...) Suppose you had inherited the same body and temperament and mind (...) Suppose you had had his environment and experiences. You would then be precisely what he was - and where he was. For it is those things -and only those things - that made him what he was. (...) You deserve very little credit for being what you are - and remember, the people who come to you irritated, bigoted, unreasoning, deserve very little discredit for being what they are.

I do not believe it possible for one to genuinely love Truth more than people (or vice versa). One might fall into the snare of loving the search more than people, or the pride of having exposed something or someone, but not the truth itself. For if you love Truth you love people; because to love people at all and without illusion, you must also love the truth about them.

I don't fully know what love is. I don't think anybody I ever met does. People do have theories about it. It’s amazing how humans love to fabricate theories and opinions on topics they know nothing about. Many times it seems that people are more obsessed towards expressing themselves on the things they don’t know, rather than honestly sharing what they know. It’s impressive how arrogance often hides selfishness in the backstage; as if arrogance was the forefront of a desperate need to unselfish oneself. In this sense, if I look back at my books, all the books I ever wrote on relationships and love, I would clearly realize that they need to be rewritten. They are not necessarily wrong in their core, but they may not be very helpful too, in a highly complex and “brain-obsessed" society as it is this on planet earth. Solutions on a mentally enslaved planet are like the sun seen behind bars to those in a prison cell. Within this perspective, we can see that humans are both consciously and unconsciously correct, in both their humane and inhumane actions and words, and being fully honest too, when rejecting it. For they need the key to their freedom more than they the sun. To these souls, the heart is further apart than the sun or the key to their freedom. They can only talk about it, as if it was a myth, just like prehistoric tribes, when addressing their folklore.

I don't know if what I'm seeing are worms, or where they come from, or what they might be if they're not worms, or whether I want them to be worms or not, or what I have to believe about this woman if they aren't worms, or about the world or human bodies or this disease if they are.

I don’t like vegans, either. Bunch of whiny zealots. A cow or a pig wouldn’t give a damn if a person died… animals tear apart other animals while they’re still alive, but we aren’t so cruel, so vegans should learn to shut up. Vegans use palm oil and never think about the forests and endangered species at risk from that… and they all exploit the world in other ways, buying their computers and their sweatshop clothes and their Starbucks coffees. Anyway, cats and dogs eat their owners after the owner dies. I saw on the news a few times that there was a lot of open animal food in the houses where that sort of thing happens, but the pets eat the dead owner… just because. Maybe a pet’s notion of ‘unconditional love’ is like Jeffrey Dahmer… he used to eat and kill the people he professed to love, too. He was a sicko… I don’t believe animals have any empathy. Do elephants ever consider Holocaust victims? Do dogs ever cry over the Rwanda Genocide?

If art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally.

I familiarize myself with every detail of their crimes and loathe what they did. At the same time, I may feel tremendous empathy and sorrow for what they went through in their young lives that contributed to their adult behavior

If a palmist grasp my palm, and look into it, without seeing a single line, what would he read?

If I could give one message to the bullies, it would be this: You are incredible. You are bound for great things. You have the potential to be anybody you want to be. There are people who believe in you. There are people who love you. Be what we know you can be, even if you don’t believe in yourself right now.

I feel therefore I am.