Quotes About Connection

The ability to move others to exchange what they have for what we have is crucial to our survival and our happiness.

I used to believe that synchronizing with others was merely a mechanical process. Now I believe that it requires a sense of belonging, rewards a sense of purpose, and reveals a part of our nature.

generally involves crossing the boundaries of domains."2 The most creative among us see relationships the rest of us never notice.

The ability to move others to exchange what they have for what we have is crucial to our survival and our happiness. It

Sit and talk about something other than work

You might be surprised. Searching for similarities—Hey, I've got a dachshund, too!—may seem trivial. We dismiss such things as "small talk." But that's a mistake. Similarity—the genuine, not the manufactured, variety—is a key form of human connection. People are more likely to move together when they share common ground.

Empathy is the ability to imagine yourself in someone else's position and to intuit what that person is feeling. It is the ability to stand in others' shoes, to see with their eyes, and to feel with their hearts. It is something we do pretty much spontaneously, an act of instinct rather than the product of deliberation.

Empathy isn't sympathy—that is, feeling bad for someone else. It is feeling with someone else, sensing what it would be like to be that person. Empathy is a stunning act of imaginative derring-do, the ultimate virtual reality—climbing into another's mind to experience the world from that person's perspective.

listen without listening for anything.

not looking at the student or the patient as a pawn on a chessboard but as a full participant in the game.

What's more, the regrets people expressed were less about renouncing the group than falling short of one's obligations to it.

we do better when we move beyond solving a puzzle to serving a person.

They think they know a lot about me, because I know a lot about them.

People at work are thirsting for context, yearning to know that what they do contributes to a larger whole. And a powerful way to provide that context is to spend a little less time telling how and a little more time showing why.

Empathy is related to Symphony—because empathic people understand the importance of context. They see the whole person much as symphonic thinkers see the whole picture.

These tools we love so much have burrowed under our skin like parasites...Making us smarter and stronger and always, always more dependent.

Lucky for us, we can give meaning to each other for free. Just by being alive.

In the grand scheme of things, all human beings are part of the same family, regardless of origin.* The divisions we have built between ourselves along the lines of race and geography are illusions.

My mom insists that my friendships online aren't real. She says that until you meet someone in person, you don't really know them. I don't agree

The true knowledge is not in the things, which are few, but in finding the connection between the things.

Our babies are the roots we dig into the world.

People need meaning as much as they need air. Lucky for us, we can give meaning to each other for free. Just by being alive.

This is love, to sit with someone you've known forever in a place you've been meaning to go, and watching as their life happens to them until you stand up and it's time to go.

They looked at each other like a pair of parentheses.