Quotes About Empathy

I have a tendency to be awfully big-hearted and it's very hard for me to say no, even when I need to.

Our human tendency is to be impatient with the person who cannot see the truth that is so plain to us. We must be careful that our impatience is not interpreted as condemnation or rejection.

We have the tendency to condemn what we don't understand.

We all have these tendencies in us that could go this way or that. I think that's the real key in writing. To look at a character without judgment.

Humans have a lot of pro-social tendencies.

I've always had a tendency to push the envelope as far as it can go without hurting someone's feelings.

Formalized rules of manners were so great because they left no room for basic human haplessness. They allowed us to circumvent our natural boorish tendency to disregard the feelings of others.

When you read the news, and you see all this bad stuff happening, there's a tendency to lose faith in humanity. But I meet so many people who restore it and realize that, actually, 99 percent of people are great.

Going to any place that you view as more politically oppressed than your own country, there's a weird tendency to assume that the whole existence is determined minute by minute by the political reality, but of course, that's not the case for any of us.

I have a tendency to think that when you portray baddies in movies, they come out more human than good guys.

It's about trying to step out of being patterned and closed off and reclusive, which I've always had a problem with. It's about attempting to be normal and just go out and be around other people and hang out. I have a tendency to sometimes be pretty closed off and not see people for long periods of time and not call anyone.

You can only beat a guy down so far before he has a tendency to start listening to what you're saying.

Paradise was made for tender hearts; hell, for loveless hearts.

Sensitiveness is closely allied to egotism; and excessive sensibility is only another name for morbid self-consciousness. The cure for tender sensibilities is to make more of our objects and less of our selves.

It's a tender and complicated dance, watching our parents age. We become protective in ways we never were before, and we study them with a mix of sadness and curiosity: Is this what we will be like when we are their age? We tell ourselves to be patient - just answer the same question again as if it wasn't answered a moment ago.

One could laugh at the world better if it didn't mix tender kindliness with its brutality.

If we have anything kind to say, any tender sentiment to express, we feel a sense of shame.

I had to learn to not be so hard. And I had a wife and, at that time, a partner when Samori was born, and for most of Samori's life, a partner, who, for whatever reason, did not have to learn that and was very tender and very, very soft with him.

Men can be tender, too.

I made 'Prozac Nation' necessary reading because I write necessarily. I tell my story because it is about everyone else: in 1993, people took pills to relieve the pain just like they do now, but it scared them; it doesn't any more, because talk is not cheap at all - it is tender.

I pray for John McArthur. I pray for, that God would tender his heart. I pray that he would have eyes of understanding.

When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity.

I have a lot of people in my life, and I think there's something key: the thing that leads to intimacy and relationship and connection is tenderness.

The idea that one might use art for 'instrumental' reasons tends to set off alarm bells at the heart of the cultural elite, who contend that it's not a pill, that it shouldn't be asked to perform some specific function, especially something as egocentric as to 'cheer you up' or to 'make you a more empathetic person.'