Quotes About Perspective

When people remembered incidents in which they were the perpetrator, they often described the harmful act as minor and done for good reasons. When they remembered incidents in which they were the victims, they were more likely to describe the action as significant, with long-lasting effects, and motivated by some combination of irrationality and sadism. Our own acts that upset others are innocent or forced; the acts that others do to upset us are crazy or cruel.

The idea I'll explore is that the act of feeling what you think others are feeling—whatever one chooses to call this—is different from being compassionate, from being kind, and most of all, from being good. From a moral standpoint, we're better off without it.

Empathy is the act of coming to experience the world as you think someone else does.

If you can imagine an alternative world, then you can see things through someone else's eyes, even if their sense of reality doesn't match your own. This makes possible perspective-taking, empathy, and much else.

the conclusion is even stronger—it's not merely that there exist some people who are both happy and have lives with meaning. It's that there is a correlation: happy people are more likely to say that their lives are meaningful, and people who say that their lives are meaningful are more likely to say that they're happy.

turns out that one can screw up being happy by trying to be happy—or at least by trying to be happy in the wrong way.

The problems we face as a society and as individuals are rarely due to lack of empathy. Actually, they are often due to too much of it.

the idea that you can't truly understand something without having experienced it yourself.

Some people engage in meaningful pursuits, and this, I argue, makes their lives better. But people don't have to think about meaning for this to work. People who mountain-climb, for instance, might have an entirely mistaken theory of what climbing does for them, just as someone who exercises might have an entirely wrong theory of the benefits of exercise.

Further, spotlights only illuminate what they are pointed at, so empathy reflects our biases.

Based on the ideas of the linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, this is the view that language doesn't just change minds by transferring thoughts from one head to another; it configures how people make sense of the world, including about space, time, and causality.

Taken as a whole, these findings suggest that when we think about our overall lives, we tend to compare ourselves with others—and when it comes to social comparison, the sky is the limit.

Seeing the world through the eyes of others is essential to many acts of kindness. For me to respond to your worries and alleviate your fears, I need to understand your thoughts, even if I don't share them. (I might soothe a child who is terrified of a small dog, even if I'm not frightened in the slightest.)

Winston Churchill: "Si no eres un liberal a los veinte, es que no tienes corazón; si no eres conservador a los cuarenta, no tienes cerebro".

life just creeps along, with long spans where nothing much happens... Stories solve this problem—as the critic Clive James once put it, 'Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.' This is one reason why Friends is more interesting than your friends.

For better or worse, then, my attack on empathy is nonpartisan. Or to put it more positively, individuals of all political orientations—liberal, conservative, libertarian, hard right, hard left, all of us—can join hands and work together in the fight against empathy.

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones," writes Richard Dawkins. After all, we're the ones who got to exist in the first place.

If our concern is driven by thoughts of the suffering of specific individuals, then it sets up a perverse situation in which the suffering of one can matter more than the suffering of a thousand.

Compassion is feeling for and not feeling with the other.

Asking people to feel as much empathy for an enemy as for their own child is like asking them to feel as much hunger for a dog turd as for an apple—it's logically possible, but it doesn't reflect the normal functioning of the human mind.

My friend does get into her clients' heads, of course—she would be useless if she couldn't—but she doesn't feel what they feel. She employs understanding and caring, not empathy

When an American comes, he or she is often assumed by Africans to be credible and authoritative. This is part of the advantage Mutebe warns against losing.

On a teaching assignment of a one-week module in Nigeria, I asked my class to evaluate the class experience. One of the pastors responded, "You have come to us, stayed with us and eaten our food." He made no mention of my teaching! Instead, he saw me as part of the family.

An African leader and I were talking about our various perspectives on the involvement of the United States in several global conflicts.' He startled me with this observation: "From most of the world's perspective, the USA doesn't have friends in the world; it has `interests.