Empathy Quotes - Page 6

No one cares how much you know, until they know how much you care

In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.

Teach the children compassion and empathy, for all creatures are born selfish.

If imagination is what enables us to conceive of and enjoy stories other than our own, and if empathy is the act of taking other people’s stories seriously, certainty deadens or destroys both qualities. When we are caught up in our own convictions, other people’s stories—which is to say, other people—cease to matter to us.

It is better to err on the side of feeling.

...Because 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.

Understanding that you can’t truly take credit for your successes, nor truly blame others for their failures will humble you and make you more compassionate.Empathy is intuitive, but is also something you can work on, intellectually.

...life makes ugly faces at us sometimes, I know.

Empathy is the stepping stone to respect

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.

Accustom yourself not to be disregarding of what someone else has to say: as far as possible enter into the mind of the speaker.

You know how the story ends. He escaped and went on to become the greatest chief Suntown ever had. He never built a shrine or a temple or even a shack in the name of Tia. In the Great Book, her name is never mentioned again. He never mused about her or even asked where she was buried. Tia was a virgin. She was beautiful. She was poor. And she was a girl. It was her duty to sacrifice her life for his.

Empathy is a creative act. It is the act of imagining ourselves not only in another's shoes, but perhaps inhabiting their very heart and soul.

To us post-moderns, empathy is a stranger in a strange land". ~R. Alan Woods [2012]

Relatedness is vital in a time when so many people suffer from social deafness. Emotional insensitivity being caused by a redoubtable “tin ear” makes it impossible to hear any signs of empathy or capture the vibrant qualities of ‘sharing’. ("Only needed a light ")

...It also taught me that while cruelty can be fun for a few moments, compassion has a much longer shelf life.

Affliction equips the suffering to empathize with others in anguish and not only does it strengthen them, it enables them to be consoling comforters in a world full of hurt.

I remember a time in a class on a cold winter morning a Japanese girl came with a surgical mask & I thought “wow people would go to extremes NOT to get sick in Japan” afterwards on a break I approached her & asked in a cynical manner: why the mask? Are you afraid of catching a cold? & then she said “in Japan you use it when YOU are under the weather & you don’t want other people to get sick, it is the polite thing to do” wow! that's a lesson I will never forget

Empathy is the highest qualification one can obtain in order to genuinely love.

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.

The novelist defines the story with the following example: If you are told that the king died and then the queen died, that is a sequence of events. If you were told that the king died and then the queen died of grief, that is a story that he was interested.

The important thing is for me to feel love towards my fellow human beings—and sometimes, that has to be at a distance.

If you don't love yourself, it makes you incapable of knowing how to love another person.

A man of God has many brothers. He is a wounded soldier - he is familiar with the pain one feels in his heart, as a close and loving brother, when a brother falls victim of evil men or turns to evil desires (the latter sometimes even betrayal). Because of this, too, he is and must be well-acquainted with and trained in the strengths of hope and the gentleness of forgiveness and mercy.

The glory of fame isn't in having so many people know you, but in having so many people know you care. Otherwise, it's like being drawn to a fire to find no warmth.

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.

That's the thing about empathy—even people with an abundance of it can run out.

But when he’s cut, I bleed.

You will never develop courage if you don’t stand in the middle of the battle afraid and pick up the sword anyways, to defend what is right. You might feel like you are outnumbered, but heroes always are.

I'm a citizen of the republic of empathy.

Parents who discipline their child by discussing the consequences of their actions produce children who have better moral development , compared to children whose parents use authoritarian methods and punishment.

I keep thinking about the fragmented quality of human awareness: You take your blindness for granted most of the time then suddenly it stuns you: how little you see as you plunge ahead from minute to minute, day to day, year to year - vision cut down to the arc of a flickering flashlight, never sure how your words and acts are affecting someone else because you never really see that someone as he is. I know we should find even the most serene life unendurable were we to possess to any real degree those extrasensory perceptions which our grandmothers believed in...

Jesus is persecuted in every injured saint, and He is mighty to avenge His beloved ones.

They say compassion is the only voice; a gift which can help mend the broken, lift the fallen and soften the hardened.

Being heartbroken doesn’t mean you stop feeling. Just the opposite — it means you feel it all more. With your heart in fragments, every sensation is sharper, every emotion more acute. Your feelings are enhanced, like a blind man with an impeccable sense of smell, or a deaf woman whose eyes can perceive things a normal person would never recognize. The brokenhearted are the best empaths of all.

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.

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.

The stories and pictures I make for the lives of the people closest to me are the forms of my empathy.

You can unlock spiritual things only from within.

Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds.

If literature does one thing, it makes you more empathetic by making you live other lives and feel the pain of others. Ideologues don't feel the pain of others because they haven't imaginatively got under their skins.

Ah! candid and unadulterated mind! you have learned early to reflect; but take care lest this habit, hitherto so well applied, should totally unfit you for society. It will strew thorns in your path, while other young women of your age seek only flowers. By imagining yourself in the place of others, as you now continually do, you will learn to feel for all the unhappy, or even for those who appear so; whereas it might save a great deal of (for the most part useless) pain, if you could contrive to feel only for yourself.

Big brotherhood is a burden. The first message he needs to hear from you is that you understand. It isn't easy having to share your parents with a smelly baby or a two-year-old pest! The more we try to convince our kids that it's not so bad, the harder they'll work to convince us that it is indeed that bad.

In return, Giovanni told me that empathizing Italians say L'ho provato sulla mia pelle, which means 'I have experienced that on my own skin.' Meaning, I have also been burned or scarred in this way, and I know exactly what you're going through.

Books can make a difference in dispelling prejudice and building community: not with role models and recipes, not with noble messages about the human family, but with enthralling stories that make us imagine the lives of others. A good story lets you know people as individuals in all their particularity and conflict; and once you see someone as a person—flawed, complex, striving—you’ve reached beyond stereotype.

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.

When it comes to moral dilemmas and matters of discerning right justice, my natural sympathy so often happens to land on the opposite end of that of most of my peers. I sometimes wonder if this is nothing more than the misguidedness and the wickedness of my own heart. I wonder other times if God wires some of us in such a way so that fair discourse might then be provided, so that honest and unbiased, due process is ultimately more likely to be carried out. Perhaps it is all necessary for variance of perception, for mindful debate: that the heart is meant to create a bit of bias on certain issues; as between one another, they weigh and balance. For not all hearts are the same.

Good and bad are illusions. What exists is either the presence of empathy or the lack of it. I think this should become the new, clear definition of how we see people. No more "good" and no more "bad". Those terms are highly subjective.

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.

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?

Imagining someone else's pain with too much surety can be as damaging as failing to imagine it.

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.

We want the people around us to show us a satisfactory measure of genuine empathy, but no one has any idea what that looks like. This puts everyone in the precarious position of guaranteed failure. I know that no one knows how to deal with stuff like this. There are no experts here.

Empathy is easier than anger, in the long-run.

We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.

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.

You cannot fully understand a person's need until you have endured the same need. As hard as you may try to predict and comprehend their situation and suffering, I guarantee you'll fall short until you've been there.

By acquiescing in an act that causes such suffering to a living creature, who among us is not diminished?

There is no force in the world better able to alter anything from its course than love.

Is it foolish to care for non-existent folk?Then, leave me to my foolishness.