Quotes About Empathy

Normal people have an incredible lack of empathy. They have good emotional empathy, but they don't have much empathy for the autistic kid who is screaming at the baseball game because he can't stand the sensory overload. Or the autistic kid having a meltdown in the school cafeteria because there's too much stimulation.

When people want to inspire you to turn against some group of people, they'll often use empathy. When Obama wanted to bomb Syria, he drew our attention to the victims of chemical warfare. And in both of the Iraq wars, politicians said, "Look at the horrific things that are happening." 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Look at the other side of things even if you know you'll never agree. It creates empathy.

Human empathy, while not found on any chart of human anatomy, is the reason we instinctively hurt for our children... it is the reason that one human being's intensely personal tests and triumphs can be harnessed to the good of countless others.

We now know, from the latest research about neurons, that we are hard-wired for empathy. We're hard-wired for cooperation. That is something about what we are as people - what it means to be a human being. And what Barack Obama was addressing was not just race or just the nature of politics. The great speeches address who we are as people, what it means to be a human being.

The crisis besetting America is not just an economic or political crisis; something deeper is wreaking havoc across the land, a mercenary and utilitarian attitude that demonstrates little empathy for people’s actual well-being, that dismisses imagination and thought, branding passion for knowledge as irrelevant.

I don't think we're getting the empathy, and identifying with the situations that many African Americans experience. That's the problem with how the story is being reported.

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.

The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy.

The only thing I can say in comparison is when I play comedy characters; I definitely put empathy in right up at the forefront. I think if you believe in someone because you not necessarily feel sorry for them, but you can see how they are the way they are and you can laugh with them, but rather than laugh at them, you are on their side and I think it's

Despite how difficult and hopeless it was at times, my experiences have shaped me for the better in many ways. It ultimately taught me empathy and invaluable lessons only learned through adversity.

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.

Replace your judgments with empathy, upgrade your complaining to gratitude and trade in your fear for love.

If you think ahead to what to say next - like how to fix it or make the person feel better - BOOM! Off the board. You're into the future. Empathy requires staying with the energy that's here right now. Not using any technique. Just being present. When I have really connected to this energy, it's like I wasn't there. I call this "watching the magic show". In this presence, a very precious energy works through us that can heal anything, and this relieves me from my "fix-it" tendencies.

It is through weakness and vulnerability that most of us learn empathy and compassion and discover our soul.

In order to get inside their skin, I have to identify with them. That includes even the ones who are complete bastards, nasty, twisted, deeply flawed human beings with serious psychological problems. Even them. When I get inside their skin and look out through their eyes, I have to feel a certain - if not sympathy, certainly empathy for them. I have to try to perceive the world as they do, and that creates a certain amount of affection.

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.

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.

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

I'm not a fan of justifying bad behavior or justifying why people are the way they are. I think that's a cop out. I don't have a lot of empathy for that.

Life-Enriching Education: an education that prepares children to learn throughout their lives, relate well to others, and themselves, be creative, flexible, and venturesome, and have empathy not only for their immediate kin but for all of humankind.

Throughout our history, there has been a long list of those we've been conditioned to hate. The British, French, Spanish, Germans, Japanese, Russians, Communists, Northern Koreans, Vietnamese, Iranians, Taliban, and both northerners and southerners in America are some of the people we've been encouraged at various times to call enemies and to hate. The list is long, and as time passes, those we were assigned to hate we later were told should be removed from our hate list. The enemy is obviously hatred itself. Have empathy for your assigned enemy.

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 involves the inner experience of sharing in and comprehending the momentary psychological state of another person.

As far as I can see it, anyone who has a problem with what guys do over there is incapable of empathy. People want America to have a certain image when we fight. Yet I would guess if someone were shooting at them and they had to hold their family members while they bled out against an enemy who hid behind their children, played dead only to throw a grenade as they got closer, and who had no qualms about sending their toddler to die from a grenade from which they personally pulled the pin....they would be less concerned with playing nicely.

...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

Empathy comes from being empathized with.

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.

Most women prefer circles of sharing to pyramids and hierarchies. They prefer conversation to construction. They will usually choose nurturance and empathy over competition and climbing. They will normally choose connection over simple performance games.

Learning a foreign language, and the culture that goes with it, is one of the most useful things we can do to broaden the empathy and imaginative sympathy and cultural outlook of children.

When you write, you take the ball and you hold it up to the light and you turn it slowly, and let people draw their own conclusions. And try to bring empathy to all sides of the equation.

I sometimes try to imagine what would have happened if we’d known the bonobo first and the chimpanzee only later—or not at all. The discussion about human evolution might not revolve as much around violence, warfare and male dominance, but rather around sexuality, empathy, caring and cooperation. What a different intellectual landscape we would occupy!

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

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.

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.

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 is the antidote to shame.

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.

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.

If it is not tempered by compassion, and empathy, reason can lead men and women into a moral void.

I think that's almost what it is sometimes if you sum up what acting is. It's just the ultimate expression of empathy.

If you connect emotionally with the plight of those characters, ou feel what they feel and you walk away with a sense of understanding and empathy, and hopefully, something has been illuminated for you. And I tink that's what happendd for a lot of readers with my novels.

Any tear shed in sharing the heartbeat of God, any tear shed through Christlike loving empathy with our fellowmen, any tear born of the yearning constraint of the Holy Spirit is a tear by which we serve the Lord. Nothing pleases Christ more than for us to share with Him His burden for the world and its people. Nothing so weds us to the heart of Christ as our tears shed as we intercede for lost ones with Him. Then truly we become people after God's own heart. Then we begin to know what it is to be Christ's prayer partners.

Empathy is the wellspring of creativity.