Quotes About Empathy

Empathy is a respectful understanding of what others are experiencing. Instead of offering empathy, we often have a strong urge to give advice or reassurance and to explain our own position or feeling. Empathy, however, calls upon us to empty our mind and listen to others with our whole being.

Empathy is not simply a matter of trying to imagine what others are going through, but having the will to muster enough courage to do something about it. In a way, empathy is predicated upon hope.

Something as important and central and encompassing as empathy can't be all bad. I think empathy plays a role in intimate relationships, where you might want your partner not just to care about you or understand you but to feel what you feel.

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.

What I learned is, we have to listen to each other, even when we don't agree, even when we think we hate each other. We have to listen to each others narratives. Not interrupt defensively, or with hostility, but really try to open our hearts and listen with empathy. I learned so much from that meeting. It was a very difficult thing to do and it was one of the best things that I ever did in my life. Look what scares you in the face, and try to understand it. Empathy, I have learned, is revolutionary.

If empathy channels our optimism, we will see the empathy and the diseases and the poor school. We will answer with our innovations and we will surprise the pessimists.

Empathy before education.

Mirror neurons make human empathy possible.

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.

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.

What songwriting does better than almost anything is empathy - it's incredibly empathetic. The reason people sat around in bars when they were bummed out and listened to country songs is because it made them feel better in the long run.

Most of my work is comedy; it's meant to inspire empathy in people and help them find joy.

Empathy is born out of the old biblical injunction 'Love the neighbor as thyself.'

Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.

I had an empathy for prisoners and did concerts for them back when I thought that it would make a difference - you know? - that they really were there to be rehabilitated.

The root of compassion is not empathy; that is kindness. Kindness is great, but it is not the ultimate compassion. Ultimate compassion relieves the suffering that comes from separateness. The suffering that comes from separateness is relieved only when you are fully present with another person, not when you are separately present.

I travel around the world in a way that tries to open my mind and give me empathy and inspire me to come home and make this world a better place.

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

What we're trying to do in conversational intelligence is not only define that trust continuum for people, not only helping them notice, which is so important, what's happening in them and others when distrust lives, but also how to bring people in trust. When they do, what happens, this part of our brain, the prefrontal cortex is loaded with wisdom, integrity, strategy, insights, empathy, foresight. It's beautiful. It's so designed for that, and often it's turned off because people don't have trust with each other.

Empathy comes from being empathized with.

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.

Peace equals ability to handle conflict, with empathy, nonviolence, and creativity.

It's very rare in our lives that we're like "Ooh, I'm going to really screw this family up." You just don't. You work from a place of need, like I want to finish this movie or I want to feel loved at that moment or I need empathy right now. And then, you do things that are questionable.

The difference between deafness and any other disability is that there is no way to put yourself in a position of knowing what it would be like because you can't stop yourself from hearing your own breath or your own heartbeat. You can not remove sound entirely from your life. You can get a sense of what being blind is like by closing and covering your eyes which provides a source of empathy because we can all project ourselves to that. But people who think they can project themselves into deafness are mistaken because you can't.

There are many aspects about what and why we photograph: visual pleasure, personal empathy, intellectual stimulation, technical excellence, etc. Serious photographers and artists will try to create works that are original. Over a career period they may develop a singular identity in their images.

I'm less interested in slasher, and go more for roles that can affect you on a personal level. I'm interested in human empathy in the movies I see, and in the ones I am a part of.

My empathy for poor people comes from having been one of them for so long, from knowing that their humanity is more complex and that the truths of their suffering have to be told honestly.

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

There was an age in which it was clear to me that my parents weren't perfect, but then there was an age at which I had empathy for that. And that was through therapy, probably. You have to rebuild and you also have to grow in your understanding of whatever it is your parents are facing, and that takes a major, profound shift of perspective from being a child.

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.

The brain controls pain. It controls fear. Sleep. Empathy. Hunger. Everything we associate with the heart or the soul or the nervous system is actually controlled by the brain. Everything. What if you could control it?

Like musicians who can read and write complicated scores in a world without sounds, for us mathematics is a source of delight, excitement, and even controversy which are hard to share with non mathematicians. In our small micro-cosmos we should ever seek the right balance between competition and solidarity, criticism and empathy, exclusion and inclusion.

Happiness doesn't lie in conspicuous consumption and the relentless amassing of useless crap. Happiness lies in the person sitting beside you and your ability to talk to them. Happiness is clear-headed human interaction and empathy. Happiness is home. And home is not a house-home is a mythological conceit. It is a state of mind. A place of communion and unconditional love. It is where, when you cross its threshold, you finally feel at peace.

Deeply affecting and compulsively readable, The Fifty-First State displays Lisa Borders' emotional acuity, first-rate skills as a storyteller, and profound empathy not only for her two compelling main characters but for an oft-neglected region and a disappearing way of life.

Empathy is one of our highest human skills and holds families and societies together. Feeling connected to other people is probably the deepest satisfaction we will ever know. How terrible for children who are being brought up without that capacity.

That's where peace begins - not just in the plans of leaders, but in the hearts of people. Not just in some carefully designed process, but in the daily connections - that sense of empathy that takes place among those who live together in this land and in this sacred city of Jerusalem.

Torture presupposes, it requires, it craves the abrogation of our capacity to imagine others suffering, dehumanizing them so much that their pain is not our pain. It demands this of the torturer, placing the victim outside and beyond any form of compassion or empathy, but also demands of everyone else the same distancing, the same numbness.

Empathy with someone else's pain or lack and a desire to help need to be balanced with a deeper realization of the eternal nature of all life and the illusion of all pain. Then let your peace flow into whatever you do, and you will be working on the levels of effect and cause simultaneously.

What's your story? It's all in the telling. Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story. Which means that a place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller's art, and then a way of traveling from here to there.

The struggle of my life created empathy... I could relate to pain... being abandoned... having people not love me.

One of the things that I think audio is best at is creating empathy.

There are many respects in which America, if it can bring itself to act with the magnanimity and the empathy appropriate to its size and power, can be an intelligent example to the world.

I think being able to sit in the shoes of a woman and being able to manage products that are mostly sold to women, alongside a lot of female employees, is really helpful because you hold that empathy to the situation. You can understand where the customer is coming from.

I think it's a very stark marker of what kind of president we have that, from all available evidence, Donald Trump has not read a book, as an adult. This is not someone who sits down in the evening to consider the latest bestseller, let alone Tolstoy - but who is very very active on this medium that requires no discipline and no attention and no empathy. It is all about retweeting praise of oneself or very quickly or poorly considered, ill-typed, misspelled diatribes against other people.

The word 'heart' can refer to an emotional bond between people, and also to the precious faculty of empathy, an 'open heart', which means sharing the feelings of another and includes an outflow of goodwill towards our fellow humans and all life forms. This, of course, is what the Dalai Lama refers to when he says "my religion is kindness", and is closely related to the ability to feel compassion.

If we took the time to learn more about different places and people, perhaps we would have more empathy for each other.

Empathy is the most powerful weapon [...]

Empathy isn't as hard as it sounds because people have a lot of the same feelings. And it helps to understand other people because then you can actually care about them sometimes. And help them. And have a friend.