c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Are you proud of yourself tonight that you have insulted a total stranger whose circumstances you know nothing about?
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
Sooner or later in life, we will all take our own turn being in the position we once had someone else in.
— Ashly Lorenzana
I believe empathy is the most essential quality of civilization.
— Roger Ebert
Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet. Because, ultimately, the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated.
— Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
I felt the kind of desperation, I think, that cancels the possibility of empathy...that makes you unkind.
— Sue Miller, While I Was Gone
Empathy isn't just something that happens to us - a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain - it's also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It's made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. Sometimes we care for another because we know we should, or because it's asked for, but this doesn't make our caring hollow. This confession of effort chafes against the notion that empathy should always rise unbidden, that genuine means the same thing as unwilled, that intentionality is the enemy of love. But I believe in intention and I believe in work. I believe in waking up in the middle of the night and packing our bags and leaving our worst selves for our better ones.
— Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams: Essays
To be with another in this [empathic] way means that for the time being, you lay aside your own views and values in order to enter another's world without prejudice. In some sense it means that you lay aside your self; this can only be done by persons who are secure enough in themselves that they know they will not get lost in what may turn out to be the strange or bizarre world of the other, and that they can comfortably return to their own world when they wish.Perhaps this description makes clear that being empathic is a complex, demanding, and strong - yet subtle and gentle - way of being.
— Carl R. Rogers, A Way of Being
Some people are far more cognizant than others but sensitivity has its own cross to bear and ample insight, in many cases, can bring on disquietude.
— Donna Lynn Hope
There is absolutely no single aspect of one’s personality that is more important to develop than empathy, which is not a skill at which men typically are asked to excel. I believe empathy is not only the core of art, literature and music, but should also be at the core of society, from ethics to economics.
— Chris Ware
Maybe your empathy's just a comforting lie, you ever think of that? Maybe you think you know how the other person feels but you're only feeling yourself, maybe you're even worst than me. Or maybe we're all just guessing.
— Peter Watts, Blindsight
Maybe this is kind of cliche, but animals, well, dogs, are what I do for a living. One reason I like spending time with them so much is they seem to think people are really good. They live with us, and obey our rules, most of which make no sense to them. And the main reason they do it is because they like us. When I watch them, sometimes I'm so blow away by how enthusiastic they are about everything we do that I have to go out and buy them something squeaky or chewy. Just because I love proving to them that it's not a mistake to see the world as a great benevolent place. I hope one day to react to something with as much pure ecstasy as I see in Chuck's face every time I throw the ball. Sometimes he looks so happy, it reminds me of the way blind people smile way too big because they can't see themselves. And if none of this links to anything in you, well... I think you don't know who I am.
— Merrill Markoe, Walking in Circles Before Lying Down
seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another, and feeling with the heart of another.
— Alfred Adler
As we tell stories about the lives of others, we learn how to imagine what another creature might feel in response to various events. At the same time, we identify with the other creature and learn something about ourselves.
— Martha C. Nussbaum
It is not learning we need at all. Individuals need learning but the culture needs something else, the pulse of light on the sea, the warm urge of huddling together to keep out the cold. We need empathy, we need the eyes that still can weep.
— Lydia Millet, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart
I think I'm an actor because I have very strong imagination and empathy. I never studied acting, but those two qualities are exactly the qualities that make for an activist.
— Susan Sarandon
All human beings have their otherness and it is that which cries out to the heart.
— Elizabeth Goudge, The White Witch
Even though I didn't think I'd like empathy it kind of creeps up on you and makes you feel all warm and glowy inside. I don't think I want to go back to life without empathy.
— Kathryn Erskine, Mockingbird
Sure, some news is bigger news than other news. War is bigger news than a girl having mixed feelings about the way some guy fucked her and didn't call. But I don't believe in a finite economy of empathy; I happen to think that paying attention yields as much as it taxes.
— Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams: Essays
When your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival.
— Yann Martel, Life of Pi
One of his greatest talents was empathy
—  no sadist can aspire to perfection without that diagnostic ability.
This is the most enormous extension of vision of which life is capable: the projection of itself into other lives. This is the lonely, magnificent power of humanity. It is . . . the supreme epitome of the reaching out.
— Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey
An imaginary circle of empathy is drawn by each person. It circumscribes the person at some distance, and corresponds to those things in the world that deserve empathy. I like the term "empathy" because it has spiritual overtones. A term like "sympathy" or "allegiance" might be more precise, but I want the chosen term to be slightly mystical, to suggest that we might not be able to fully understand what goes on between us and others, that we should leave open the possibility that the relationship can't be represented in a digital database.If someone falls within your circle of empathy, you wouldn't want to see him or her killed. Something that is clearly outside the circle is fair game. For instance, most people would place all other people within the circle, but most of us are willing to see bacteria killed when we brush our teeth, and certainly don't worry when we see an inanimate rock tossed aside to keep a trail clear.The tricky part is that some entities reside close to the edge of the circle. The deepest controversies often involve whether something or someone should lie just inside or just outside the circle. For instance, the idea of slavery depends on the placement of the slave outside the circle, to make some people nonhuman. Widening the circle to include all people and end slavery has been one of the epic strands of the human story - and it isn't quite over yet.A great many other controversies fit well in the model. The fight over abortion asks whether a fetus or embryo should be in the circle or not, and the animal rights debate asks the same about animals.When you change the contents of your circle, you change your conception of yourself. The center of the circle shifts as its perimeter is changed. The liberal impulse is to expand the circle, while conservatives tend to want to restrain or even contract the circle. Empathy Inflation and Metaphysical AmbiguityAre there any legitimate reasons not to expand the circle as much as possible?There are. To expand the circle indefinitely can lead to oppression, because the rights of potential entities (as perceived by only some people) can conflict with the rights of indisputably real people. An obvious example of this is found in the abortion debate. If outlawing abortions did not involve commandeering control of the bodies of other people (pregnant women, in this case), then there wouldn't be much controversy. We would find an easy accommodation.Empathy inflation can also lead to the lesser, but still substantial, evils of incompetence, trivialization, dishonesty, and narcissism. You cannot live, for example, without killing bacteria. Wouldn't you be projecting your own fantasies on single-cell organisms that would be indifferent to them at best? Doesn't it really become about you instead of the cause at that point?
— Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget
How can the intensity of this shame be understood by those who have never experienced it? How can they understand the strength of the motivations produced by the desire to escape from it?
— Didier Eribon, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self
If you look into someone's face long enough, eventually you're going to feel that you're looking at yourself.
— Paul Auster, Mr. Vertigo
(In part, quoting Robert Keegan from Harvard):'When we take the risk of really witnessing another human being, when we validate their human experience, we risk becoming recruited to their welfare.' I allow my empathy to be engaged, and once it is - because my feelings help teach me what my values are - I'm on the path for which there is no return. I am inexorably an advocate when I allow my empathy to be engaged.
— Ashley Judd
My knowledge of myself is direct, synthetic, from within outwards; my knowledge of other persons is indirect, analytical, from outside inwards. My knowledge of myself starts at the core; that of others at the crust.
— Salvador de Madariaga, Essays with a Purpose
But the moods could be contagious. He didn't need one right now.
— Josephine Humphreys, The Fireman's Fair
call it empathy. That means putting yourself in the place of the other person and seeing their point of view. I suppose it's because in the very olden days, when humans had to fight fir themselves every day, they needed to find people who would fight with them too, and together we lived—yes, and prospered. Humans need other humans—it's as simple as that.
— Terry Pratchett, The Shepherd's Crown
History is not just facts and events. History is also a pain in the heart and we repeat history until we are able to make another's pain in the heart our own.
— Julius Lester
Loss of empathy might well be the most enduring and deep-cutting scar of all, the silent blade of an unseen enemy, tearing at our hearts and stealing more than our strength. Stealing our will, for what are we without empathy? What manner of joy might we find in our live if we cannot understand the joys and pains of those around us, if we cannot share in a greater community.
— R.A. Salvatore, The Silent Blade
When my sister was released from the mental hospital, she came to live with me in the tilting and crumbling one-bedroom house I'd bought with the small amount of money I inherited when our parents died. She arrived one afternoon unannounced in a taxi. She must have known instinctively that I'd take her in. I don't know how or why they released her. Probably due to overcrowding, and they had her scratch her name on a form then pushed her out the door. Or maybe she just slipped away when no one was looking (who'd notice in a place like that?)--she never did tell me and I didn't ask her. I was so happy to have her with me again that the last thing I wanted to do was break the spell by letting reality intrude. Ever since they'd dragged her away weeping with laughter and reaching out for me with our parents' blood still coating her hands with shiny red gloves, I'd felt amputated, like they'd pulled her kicking and screaming and insane out of my guts.
— Michael Gira, The Consumer
Holden went to his bungalow and began to understand that he was not alone in the world, and also that he was afraid for the sake of another, -- which is the most soul-satisfying fear known to man.
— Rudyard Kipling, Selected Stories
Be yourself one hundred and one thousand percent. Everybody man, from the sides to the back to the middle to the sides, you might not even know people, but if you rock with Lil B music and respect me from the core, you should know that based means you have someone you can trust, because we all have a common courtesy. It’s about having empathy now. What I mean is really caring and paying attention to somebody else’s feeling. You gotta have empathy and know we all on this common vibe. It’s all peace. It’s saying, hey, you know what, you can hit me and I’m not hitting you back. And that takes a very big person to do that.
— Brandon McCartney
This is where the will to grapple with our hard and pressing environmental problems begins: in relationship to something other that you love beyond any utility, beyond any logic.
— Susan Freinkel, American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree
Imagine if suffering were real.Imagine if those old people were afraid of death.What if the midget or the girl with one armreally felt pain? Imagine how impossible it would beto live if some people werealone and afraid all their lives.
— Jack Gilbert
If you could understand impermanence deeply, you would develop more equanimity. You would not get too excited about either the ups and downs of life.
— Satya Nadella, Hit Refresh
Empathy--the ability to identify with someone else's suffering--is certainly a prerequisite for a genuine apology.
— Danielle Ofri, What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine
Empathy requires being attuned to the patient's perspective and understanding how the illness is woven into this particular persons' life. Last--and this is where doctors often stumble--empathy requires being able to communicate all of this to the patient.
— Danielle Ofri, What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine
In general, empathy is easier the more we can identify with someone. When we can genuinely envision ourselves in a situation, it's possible to intuit what that person's suffering might feel like.
— Danielle Ofri, What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine
It can be rough going to maintain both composure and empathy in these situations, but a doctor's failure to do that is probably the number one reason why patients feel dissatisfied with their physicians and end up doctor-shopping endlessly.
— Danielle Ofri, What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine
But while the patient does bear some responsibility, I believe that the onus falls more heavily on the doctor to be attuned to the factors--cultural, ethnic, or just personal style--that influence how patients present their symptoms.
— Danielle Ofri, What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine
Hospital life--with its byzantine array of moving parts layered atop the unpredictable rhythms of illness--is a permanent state of flux.
— Danielle Ofri, What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine
What these older physicians exhibited is termed clinical curiosity. They stroke to understand their patients in order to elucidate the underlying medical conditions. This thoroughness, patience, and dogged curiosity may have been ingrained in them because they trained at a time when they were no rapid CTs or MRIs. But even now, when these diagnostic tools are at their fingertips, these physicians maintain this approach to patients, one that serves to appreciate the dignity and uniqueness of each patient and his or her illness.
— Danielle Ofri, What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine
But I realized that not only did I need to keep tuning my skills as a doctor, I also had to figure out a way to live with the uncertainty of medicine and its attendant anxiety.
— Danielle Ofri, What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine
Burnout also leads to a large swath of physicians who aren't as empathetic toward their patients as they could be.
— Danielle Ofri, What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine
It is not accidental that the most unsympathetic characters in Austen's novels are those who are incapable of genuine dialogue with others. They rant. They lecture. They scold. This incapacity for true dialogue implies an incapacity for tolerance, self-reflection and empathy.
— Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran
There was always something to learn from listening to and understanding people´s viewpoints.
— Michelle Madow, Diamonds in the Rough
The process of categorisation is as old as men, yet as old as man alone, for no other animal species categorises itself so neatly. Yet the ultimate, most vulnerable and weakest victim of categorisation is empathy. Categorisation is a process that destroys the very empathy that enlivens communities: the empathy that traditionally binds diverse communities together.
— Joshua Krook, Us vs Them: A Case for Social Empathy
The stories and pictures I make for the lives of the people closest to me are the forms of my empathy.
— Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays
Find an excellent quote about "Stories with a Dramatic Arc" by Deb Volberg Search for "the yellow dress" on Youtubetinyurl dot com / storywithdrama2014 tells the highlightsWhen we tell stories about a change in our life, we develop a neural coupling with our audience. the key is developing empathy by showing a change in our beliefs
— Deb Volberg
less apathy,more empathy.
— Scott Stabile
I asked Patrick if he felt sad that he had to keep it a secret, and Patrick just said that he wasn't sad because at least now, Brad doesn't have to get drunk or stoned to make love.
— Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Empathy is not something we offer to our customers or our employees from nine to five... (it) is... "a second by second, minute by minute service that [we] owe to everyone if [we] want to call [ourselves] a leader.
— Simon Sinek, Leaders Eat Last
Dream!Forge yourself and riseOut of your mind and into others.Men, be women.Fish, be flies.Girls, take beards.Sons, be your mothers.The future of the world now liesIn coral wombs behind our eyes.
— Clive Barker, Absolute Midnight
For some, life may be a playground to undermine the brainwaves of others or simply a vainglorious game with an armory of theatrics, illustrating only bleak self-deception, haughty narcissism and dim deficiency in empathy. ("Another empty room")
— Erik Pevernagie
I'm not interested in whether you've sat with the great
—  I'm interested in whether you've sat with the broken.
To be a strong and empathetic person always requires us to trust that God will send angels to the people's heart we tried to reach, but couldn't.
— Shannon L. Alder
The world needs them - the ones who absorb the emotions of others, which diminishes their pain and disquietude and the world also uses them as a repository for confessions, secrets, grudges and indignation. They will leave these uncommon and intuitive individuals feeling unburdened themselves while the unusual individual will be weighed down by having taken on those burdens in addition to their own. The world needs them but what they need is something as aberrant as themselves, and that is silence, stillness and rest.
— Donna Lynn Hope
An officer put me in my place from the first moment.I was standing by the billiard-table and in my ignorance blocking up the way, and he wanted to pass; he took me by the shoulders and without a word--without a warning or explanation--moved me from where I was standing to another spot and passed by as though he had not noticed me. I could have forgiven blows, but I could not forgive his having moved me without noticing me.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
If I had an ear 2 confide inI would cry among my treasured friendsBut who do u know that stops that longto help another carry onThe world moves fast and it would rather pass u bythan 2 stop and c what makes u cry
— Tupac Shakur, The Rose That Grew from Concrete
To us he's like... like scenery, in the background of our lives, but for him, he's the main character. He has a life and a job and a whole story. He's a real person. And to him, we're the background scenery.
— Dan Wells, Mr. Monster
It is arrogant to pretend to understand everybody, and doing it in order to live with them, or love them-- well. If it depended on understanding, there would not be any communities, or relationships. Worse, if you spend your life waiting to be understood or, something more horrible, waiting for the others to be like you. Well, it is as useless, as always shouting the same word until it means nothing else.
— Edward Wells II, Commuter: A Novella
He laughed and the others laughed with him, except Babe, who resented slightly that what he felt so deeply could be reduced to a humor.
— J.D. Salinger, Last Day of the Last Furlough
Digital is the age of empathy.
— Pearl Zhu, Thinkingaire: 100 Game Changing Digital Mindsets to Compete for the Future
If he’s not he should be by now. The things that happen to people we never really know. What happens in houses behind closed doors, what secrets—
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
...life makes ugly faces at us sometimes, I know.
— Edith Wharton, The Buccaneers
Most men would rather be shot through with a broad-headed arrow than be described by you.
— Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver
Empathy requires us to step outside of our own agendas long enough to develop an understanding of the other person's perspective. It can be rightly stated that no relationship will be whole without ongoing displays of empathy.
— Les Carter, Enough about You, Let's Talk about Me: How to Recognize and Manage the Narcissists in Your Life
Being autistic does not mean I don't have empathy. Stereotypes are harmful. If anything I hyper feel everything and have to try to shut off to cope.
— Tina J. Richardson, I didnt mean it that way
What do you want to say to me?’‘Nothing—just to talk about the profession I am entering. I am about to practice virtue in order to find a man who loves it only to destroy it' [replied Mademoiselle Vesian.]‘That is it exactly; and believe me, everything in this life is much the same. We refer everything to ourselves, and each of us is a tyrant. That is why the best of mortals is he who is tolerant.
— Giacomo Casanova, History of My Life, Volumes III & IV
Ask yourself if you’re taking the time to see beyond the surface.
— Arthur P. Ciaramicoli, The Stress Solution: Using Empathy and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to Reduce Anxiety and Develop Resilience
We learn to become more empathic when we slow down, become present, and are fully committed to understanding another person’s uniqueness.
— Arthur P. Ciaramicoli, The Stress Solution: Using Empathy and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to Reduce Anxiety and Develop Resilience
When we give and receive empathy, transformation occurs.
— Arthur P. Ciaramicoli, The Stress Solution: Using Empathy and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to Reduce Anxiety and Develop Resilience
the more different you and I are, the less we will be able to identify with each other, and the more difficult it will to understand each other. If we can't see ourselves in another person at all—if his beliefs and background and reactions and emotions conflict too radically with our own—we often just withdraw the assumption that he is like us in any important way. That kind of dehumanization generally leads nowhere good.
— Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
The way to understand any enemy is to realize that, from his perspective, he is not a villain but a hero.
— Desmond Tutu, The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World
Empathy allows us to enter the world of another. It allows us to take a mental vacation from ourselves.
— Arthur P. Ciaramicoli, The Stress Solution: Using Empathy and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to Reduce Anxiety and Develop Resilience
Empathy plays a crucial role in the reduction of stress from the moment of birth.
— Arthur P. Ciaramicoli, The Stress Solution: Using Empathy and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to Reduce Anxiety and Develop Resilience
I didn't enjoy what was happening but I enjoyed who I was while I was watching it. It offered evidence of my own inclination toward empathy.
— Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams: Essays
Giving and empathy provide us with opportunities to nurture our innate goodness.
— Arthur P. Ciaramicoli, The Stress Solution: Using Empathy and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to Reduce Anxiety and Develop Resilience
Empathy is the key to negotiating and resolving conflict.
— Arthur P. Ciaramicoli, The Stress Solution: Using Empathy and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to Reduce Anxiety and Develop Resilience
Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.
— Peter A. Levine
One of the easiest things in life is to judge others. One of the simplest things we can ever do is to tell how wrong people are. One of the most thoughtless things we can ever do is to show people their faults unconstructively. It is always so easy and common to do such things but, before you do that, find the uncommon reasons for the faulty life.Yes! before you do that, identify how to correct a faulty life and before you do that, think of what drives and invokes the joy, slothfulness or the melancholy in people. Until you go through what people have been through, until you experience what has become a part of people, until you understand what drives the real interest of people and until you become fully aware of the real vision, aspirations, desires and the needs of others, ponder before you criticize!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Mankind needs more empathy.
— Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
That's the thing about empathy—even people with an abundance of it can run out.
— Theresa Brown
Paul didn't just see emotions. He saw the need they represented.
— Beth Moore, To Live Is Christ
Sometimes we call what we do not understand primitive, sometimes magic. Each of us has a perspective to which we are attached. We only understand the other in relation to what we already know, but by believing, sympathising, even empathising, sometimes we can see beyond the limits of our knowledge. The alternative is to ignore or to attack.
— Christopher Potter, How to Make a Human Being: A Body of Evidence
Writing complex characters is the penultimate exercise in empathy.
— Kevin Focke
When you know the truth about a person then they become real to you, not just a face that you can forget.
— Drea Damara, Chasing Vengeance
Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. out of wounds and across boundaries. Sadness becomes seizure. Empathy demands another kind of porousness in response. My Stephanie script is twelve pages long. I think mainly about what it doesn't say.
— Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams: Essays
There were relatives of their victims among the Hogwarts students, who now found themselves the unwilling objects of a gruesome sort of reflected fame as they walked the corridors: Susan Bones, whose uncle, aunt, and cousins had all died at the hands of one of the ten, said miserably during Herbology that she now had a good idea what it felt like to be Harry."And I don't know how you stand it- it's horrible" she said bluntly.
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
I feel bad for Donna Middleton. But I do not feel sorry for her. This is a fine distinction, I think, but it feels right to me. I do not think Donna Middleton would appreciate my feeling sorry for her.
— Craig Lancaster, 600 Hours of Edward
If the boundaries of the self are defined by what we feel, then those who cannot feel even for themselves shrink within their own boundaries, while those who feel for others are enlarged, and those who feel compassion for all beings must be boundless. They are not separate, not alone, not lonely, not vulnerable in the same way as those of us stranded in the islands of ourselves, but they are vulnerable in other ways. Still, that sense of the dangers of feeling for others is so compelling that many withdraw, and develop elaborate stories to justify withdrawal, and then forget that they have shrunk. Most of us do, one way or another.
— Rebecca Solnit
We develop more empathy, when we realise that we are all ultimately looking for the same things - love, peace and acceptance.
— Chikamso C. Efobi
Lincoln learned to summon the passions, but he never addressed his audience as sweethearts.
— Richard Brookhiser, Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln
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)
— Aelred of Rievaulx, Spiritual Friendship
Fear trumps empathy.
— Cindy Aime
Empathy is a kind of care but it’s not the only kind of care, and it’s not always enough.
— Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams: Essays
The author points out that, with life in provincial Washington difficult for those not of independent means, Adams and his wife undervalued the social connections that others found vital. They often made an impression as distant and prideful.
— Paul C. Nagel, John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, a Private Life
So that made me happy but the part that really made me happy was that you wanted me to be happy. That's what Thank you means.
— Margaret Atwood, MaddAddam
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.
— Donna Lynn Hope
Once you take the time to consider the other person's perspective, you will become sympathetic to his feel ins and ideas. You will be able to authentically and honestly say, "I don't blame you for feeling as you do. If I were in your position, I would feel just as you do.
— Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People
There’s something almost greedy about empathy, because it relies on the notion that we can somehow assimilate the other. A respectful and thoughtful distance is also part of what enables us to respond to the other’s needs.
— Kate Rossiter
When you get caught up on other peoples' problems, solve them with caution so you don't suffer the excessive burdens of regrets.
— Darmie O-Lujon
An inability (or reduced ability) to empathise is not the same as an inability to love. Love is a powerful feeling for another person, often defying logic.
— Graeme Simsion, The Rosie Project
Sniff looked at them and noticed that they were much smaller than he was, so he felt kinder and said, condescendingly. "Hullo. Nice to see you.
— Tove Jansson, Finn Family Moomintroll
The author's differing experience of school geography as a faculty member going from parking lot to parking lot and to locations centered around HER office and her experience of the more scattered life of a student speaks to a larger truth. As adults, we are used to following the same routine and look romantically on anything different.
— Rebekah Nathan, My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student
It is said that there comes a point in every mathematics student's education when he hears himself saying to the teacher, "I think I understand"-- and that's the point at which he has hit a wall. Making sure that all gifted students hit their own personal walls is crucial for developing the empathy with the rest of the world. When they see their less lucky peers struggle academically, they need to be able to say "I know how it feels,"-- and be telling the truth.
— Charles Murray, Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality
Empathy seems to have been replaced with judgement in today's world. NO ONE has arrived. I repeat, NO ONE has arrived. We all experience joy, happiness, sadness, anger, disappointment, fear, etc... Some of the most successful people have said things in interviews that give you a peek into their vulnerable areas. The differences are found in how we manage our own issues so if you are beating yourself up, comparing yourself or on the other end of the spectrum looking down on others...please stop! We are all searching for significance in one way or another...some have found it within while it takes others a little more time searching the outside. Be true to yourself and allow others to do the same. Remember, no one has it all together all the time. NO ONE HAS ARRIVED...WE ARE ALL BE-COMING. HUMANS BE-ING. So let folks BE.
— Sanjo Jendayi
LEAR: ...yet you see how this world goes.GLOS.: I see it feelingly.
— William Shakespeare
An android,” he said, “doesn’t care what happens to another android. That’s one of the indications we look for."“Then,” Miss Luft said, “you must be an android.
— Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
My mother always tells me that anyone who gets enjoyment from other people's misery will eventually get the greatest discomfort from his or her own miseries.
— Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu
To be exploited fundamentally means to be confused. When you're not confused you can't be exploited because you have clarity about the situation. To confuse people you must provide contradictory information. People who really want to do you harm will provide you confusing measures of good and bad feedback because that keeps you disorientated. Evil always want to camouflage itself as virtue witch means all the bad things that evil does is called justice against immorality. So they camouflage their brutality as a mask of virtue. Camouflage is so fundamentally an aspect of the predator-prey relationships. The mugger does not camouflage himself but, that's because he can leave. He is gonna run off and you'll never find him or catch him or at least that's the goal or plan right? The relationships were you're supposed to stay and continue to provide resources are the ones were camouflage is the most essential because you're constantly looking at somebody who is a predator and that have to continually camouflage themselves as somebody who is not a predator. The most fundamental thing is the camouflage of non-empathy with empathy. This is why people who lack empathy always use the language of empathy and that's whats so confusing.There are a lot of great antidotes to this. I mean, you just ask that person questions about yourself that they dont have any self interest in knowing and find out whether they know the answers. All the things personal to you that dont have any direct impact on the other person. It's a great way to find out whether they have empathy or curiosity about you or not.
— Stefan Molyneux
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.
— Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
I think that many people do not know what empathy is. They think empathy is understanding their own selves and then connecting with like-minded individuals, who of course will understand them since they all share the same ideas. Empathy has nothing to do with likemindedness; it has to do with being able to feel the things that others feel, even when you do not share the same ideas, life story, or absolutely nothing at all! When I hear someone say, “I don’t understand you”, that makes me feel sorry for them. I can even understand a rock, and they can’t understand me? My pet rocks have more empathy than they do.
— C. JoyBell C.
Still, this was on the order of a minor miracle, running across someone to whom you can express your feeling so clearly, so completely. Most people go their entire lives without meeting a person like that. It would have been mistake to label this "love". It was more like total empathy.
— Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
Senators came to realize that he understood not only their bills but the reasons they had introduced them
Those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.
— J.K. Rowling
To erase the possibility of empathy is to erase the possibility of understanding.To erase the possibility of empathy is also to erase the possibility of art. Theater, fiction, horror stories, love stories. This is what art does. Good or bad, it imagines the insides, the heart of the other, whether that heart is full of light or trapped in darkness.
— Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help
Ironically, torture requires empathy, too, in the sense that one cannot deliberately inflict pain without realizing what is painful.
— Frans de Waal
[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.
— Azar Nafisi, The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books
I thought it would teach them a thing or two about empathy, and friendship, and loyalty. As it turns out, Jack Will didn't need to learn any of these virtues- he already had them in abundance.
— R.J. Palacio
Sure, the outcome was favourable, but what was the cost? Wasn't changing the way she felt about something not far from taking away her free will altogether?
— Cassandra Page, Isla's Inheritance
No matter what the situation may be, I still take pleasure in witnessing the joy of others.
— Haruki Murakami, The Strange Library
Empathy? What’s that?” Glokta winced as he rubbed at his aching leg. “It’s a sad fact, but pain only makes you sorry for yourself.
— Joe Abercrombie, Before They Are Hanged
The way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people's pain.
— James     Baldwin
Call the world, if you please, "the Vale of Soul Making". Then you will find out the use of the world....There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions -- but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself.Intelligences are atoms of perception -- they know and they see and they are pure, in short they are God. How then are Souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given them -- so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each one's individual existence. How, but in the medium of a world like this?This point I sincerely wish to consider, because I think it a grander system of salvation than the Christian religion -- or rather it is a system of Spirit Creation...I can scarcely express what I but dimly perceive -- and yet I think I perceive it -- that you may judge the more clearly I will put it in the most homely form possible. I will call the world a school instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read. I will call the human heart the hornbook used in that school. And I will call the child able to read, the soul made from that school and its hornbook.Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul? A place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways....As various as the lives of men are -- so various become their souls, and thus does God make individual beings, souls, identical souls of the sparks of his own essence.This appears to me a faint sketch of a system of salvation which does not affront our reason and humanity...
— John Keats
Imagining someone else's pain with too much surety can be as damaging as failing to imagine it.
— Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams: Essays
We like who we become in response to injustice: it makes it easy to choose a side. Our capacity to care, to get angry, is called forth like some muscle we weren't entirely aware we had.
— Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams: Essays
I needed people to deliver my feelings back to me in a form that was legible. Which is a superlative kind of empathy to seek, or to supply: an empathy that rearticulates more clearly what it's shown.
— Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams: Essays
Without empathy, there'd be no harmony in diversity
— Jennifer Tindugan-Adoviso
Empathy is a breaking down of the false constructs of division between the observer and the observed.
— Chris Matakas, #Human: Learning To Live In Modern Times
A book is a little empathy machine. It puts you inside somebody else's head. You see out of the world through somebody else's eyes. It's very hard to hate people of a certain kind when you've just read a book by one of those people.
— Neil Gaiman
The environment is not an "other" to us. It is not a collection of things that we encounter. Rather, it is part of our being. It is the locus of our existence and identity. We cannot and do not exist apart from it. It is through empathic projection that we come to know our environment, understand how we are part of it and how it is part of us. This is the bodily mechanism by which we can participate in nature, not just as hikers or climbers or swimmers, but as part of nature itself, part of a larger, all-encompassing whole. A mindful embodied spirituality is thus an ecological spirituality. An embodied spirituality requires an aesthetic attitude to the world that is central to self-nurturance, to the nurturance of others, and to the nurturance of the world itself. Embodied spirituality requires an understanding that nature is not inanimate and less than human, but animated and more than human. It requires pleasure, joy in the bodily connection with earth and air, sea and sky, plants and animals - and the recognition that they are all more than human, more than any human beings could ever achieve. Embodied spirituality is more than spiritual experience. It is an ethical relationship to the physical world.
— George Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought
Digital age of business and world shall move up from apathy, to sympathy, to empathy.
— Pearl Zhu, Digital Master
You don't have to go through someone's pain to understand it. Empathy is enough.
— Saru Singhal
How often have our own tears blinded us to the tears of others.
— Marty Rubin
The agony of the empath is feeling their pain but being unable to save them from it.
— Donna Lynn Hope
This is what differentiates sympathy from empathy. No matter how much I care for you, it's not until I recognize me in you and you in me that the veil of gauze is lifted on the world.
— Jackson Galaxy, Cat Daddy: What the World's Most Incorrigible Cat Taught Me About Life, Love, and Coming Clean
Empathy isn't just listening, it's asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to.
— Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams: Essays
This is the grand fiction of tourism, that bringing our bodies somewhere draws that place closer to us, or we to it. It's a quick fix of empathy.
— Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams: Essays
Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds.
— Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams: Essays
Many of the great humanitarian and environmental campaigns of our time have been to make the unknown real, the invisible visible, to bring the faraway near, so that the suffering of sweatshop workers, torture victims, beaten children, even the destruction of other species and remote places, impinges on the imagination and perhaps prompts you to act.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
Any empathic person who knows how valuable time is will think twice before wasting another person's time, because losing time is losing a part of your life.
— Innocent Mwatsikesimbe, Mirror
When we fail to harmonize and integrate, living systems, from individuals to families and countries, tend to move toward either chaos or rigidity.
— Tobin Hart, The Four Virtues: Presence, Heart, Wisdom, Creation
Doing things for yourself (self-preservation) are ok in in small doses and when necessary but over-burdening you life with your own self will weaken your heart, soul connectivity with others
— Paul Isaacs
It wasn't like the World Trade Center, something vile and astonishing within our own borders, happening to people who'd saved coins of the same currency in their piggybanks when they were children. I knew intellectually that shouldn't make a difference, but it seemed to.
— Michael Marshall, The Straw Men
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.
— Colson Whitehead
An empath is capable of taking on the grief of another in order to lessen their suffering. In order to not be consumed with pain, an empath should have an outlet for that pain lest they lose themselves in feeling for others.
— Donna Lynn Hope
Other people are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself.
— Cherie Carter-Scott, If Life Is a Game, These Are the Rules: Ten Rules for Being Human as Introduced in Chicken Soup for the Soul
I had a dream that I was in someone else’s shoes for once…they were the wrong size.
— Starley Ard, Dreaming is for lovers
A writer is like a tuning fork: We respond when we’re struck by something. The thing is to pay attention, to be ready for radical empathy. If we empty ourselves of ourselves we’ll be able to vibrate in synchrony with something deep and powerful. If we’re lucky we’ll transmit a strong pure note, one that isn’t ours, but which passes through us. If we’re lucky, it will be a note that reverberates and expands, one that other people will hear and understand.
— Roxana Robinson
I think if God came down and gave us all His version of Empathy then all the world’s problems would surely become a thing of the past.
— Duane Hewitt
I wish I had the talent to paint the way I feel about you, for my words always feel inadequate. I imagine using red for your passion and pale blue for your kindness; forest green to reflect the depth of your empathy and bright yellow for your unflagging optimism. And still I wonder: can even an artist’s palette capture the full range of what you mean to me?
— Nicholas Sparks, The Longest Ride
Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see.
— Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams: Essays
We make ourselves large or small, here or there, in our empathies.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
Empathy Is An Endangered Instinct
— Dean Cavanagh
We weep for the blood of a bird, but not for the blood of a fish. Blessed are those who have voice.
— Mamoru Oshii
The third facilitative aspect of the relationship is empathic understanding. This means that the therapist senses accurately the feelings and personal meanings that the client is experiencing and communicates this understanding to the client. When functioning best, the therapist is so much inside the private world of the other that he or she can clarify not only the meanings of which the client is aware but even those just below the level of awareness. This kind of sensitive, active listening is exceedingly rare in our lives. We think we listen, but very rarely do we listen with real understanding, true empathy. Yet listening, of this very special kind, is one of the most potent forces for change that I know.
— Carl R. Rogers
I’m pretty sure all the individuals trying to control other people’s happiness have none in their own lives.
— Sarah Liss, Army of Lovers: A Community History of Will Munro, the artist, activist, impresario, and civic hero who brought together Toronto's club kids, art fags, hardcore boys ...
When we see others cry it is difficult, not because of feeling their pain, but your own.
— Paula Heller Garland