Quotes About Understanding

So lange ihr in euren Schulen mit Leuten vom Handwerke nach der vorgeschriebenen Form darüber redet , täuscht euch beide eben diese vorgeschriebene Form , und wenn ihr nur über sie einig seyd , schenkt ihr euch gegenseitig manche Frage, deren deutliche Beantwortung euch beschwerlich fallen dürfte.

The more novels you read, the better you were at reading other people's emotions. It was a huge effect. This wasn't just a sign that you were better educated—because reading nonfiction books, by contrast, had no effect on your empathy.

Your working assumption, when you meet a homophobe, should be that they are gay.

If you see the world through fragments, your empathy often doesn't kick in, in the way that it does when you engage with something in a sustained, focused way.

In fact, the world is complex. To reflect that honestly, you usually need to focus on one thing for a significant amount of time, and you need space to speak at length. Very few things worth saying can be explained in 280 characters.

It's that their model of you is so accurate that it's making predictions about you that you think are magic.

They wanted easy answers to complex fears.

When they got the results, they were clear. The more novels you read, the better you were at reading other people's emotions. It was a huge effect. This wasn't just a sign that you were better educated—because reading nonfiction books, by contrast, had no effect on your empathy.

the medium of the book tells us several things. Firstly, life is complex, and if you want to understand it, you have to set aside a fair bit of time to think deeply about it. You need to slow down. Secondly, there is a value in leaving behind your other concerns and narrowing down your attention to one thing, sentence after sentence, page after page. Thirdly, it is worth thinking deeply about how other people live and how their minds work. They have complex inner lives just like you.

fiction is a kind of empathy gym,

There's a Buddhist saying—be grateful for your suffering, because it allows you to empathize with the suffering of others.

How could I still be depressed when I was taking antidepressants? I was doing everything right, and yet something was still wrong. Why?

be grateful for your suffering, because it allows you to empathize with the suffering of others.

A compassionate approach leads to less addiction.

Your pain makes sense

what we are sacrificing is depth in all sorts of dimensions…. Depth takes time. And depth takes reflection.

three crucial things that are happening during mind-wandering. First, you are slowly making sense of the world.

His goal as a doctor was always "trying to identify what happened in the past" of an addict that made them find everyday life unbearable, and to help them overcome it by offering compassion and helping them to build a good life as an alternative. Now they were asking: If this is the goal of all good doctors, why can't it be the goal of government policy?

Instead of saying our pain is an irrational spasm to be taken away with drugs, they see that we should start to listen to it and figure out what it is telling us.

A one-way relationship can't cure loneliness. Only two-way (or more) relationships can do that.

something the psychologist W. M. Mace said years ago, riffing on JFK: "Ask not what's inside your head,"9 he said. "Ask what your head's inside of.

Empathy makes progress possible, and every time you widen human empathy, you open the universe a little more.

the faster you make them go, the less they will understand. More speed means less comprehension. ...This showed there's just a maximum limit for how quickly humans can absorb information, and trying to bust through that barrier simply busts your brain's ability to understand it instead. The scientists investigating this also discovered that if you make people read quickly, they are much less likely to grapple with complex or challenging material. They start to prefer simplistic statements.

This showed there's just a maximum limit for how quickly humans can absorb information, and trying to bust through that barrier simply busts your brain's ability to understand it instead.