Quotes About Empathy

No one manages until he or she has "walked in the shoes" of those being managed.

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

That's the great thing about literature -- it makes the world less lonely.

The Buddhists think that, because we've all had infinite previous lives, we've all been each other's relatives. Therefore all of you, in the Buddhist view, in some previous life … have been my mother — for which I do apologize for the trouble I caused you.

Anger spoils relationships where there should be great reciprocity.

In the practice of exchanging self & other, paradoxes abound.

I would rather have eyes that cannot see; ears that cannot hear; lips that cannot speak, than a heart that cannot love.

The human heart feels things the eyes cannot see, and knows what the mind cannot understand.

This man has been disagreeable to you, and I want to tell you that any time you feel inclined to kick him, why, I will hold the other creature.

They must come to face the facts about their illness and its cause and must learn to feel worthwhile and lovable. At the end of this difficult and arduous process they should be able to transfer their learning to other persons in the social environment and be able to make the necessary adjustment for living in the larger world.

The patient creates a negative picture of people to support deep feelings of basic mistrust. In losing empathy and feeling for others, one no longer feels compassion toward oneself. This condition arouses a profound sense of existential guilt that only adds to the feelings of self-hatred and isolation. Loss

To people who were not seen or were misunderstood as children, the experience of being seen as a person can be very moving, tantamount to a spiritual experience.

People who are self-denying and selfless have little to offer to others.

Doctors think they are more important in their patients' lives than their patients do.

Patients possess a body of knowledge about themselves that we can never hope to master, and we have a body of knowledge about medicine that they can never hope to master. Our job is to bring these two groups together so we can serve each other well.

At least we should learn to understand our fellow beings, for we are powerless to stop their misery, their ignominy, their suffering, their weakness, and their death.

interpersonal trauma subtype

When will suffering cease? Not until individuality is lost.

What there is to be proud of? One answer is: Darwin-like behavior. Go above and beyond the call of a smoothly functioning conscience; help those who aren´t likely to help you in return, and do so when nobody is watching

There's no doubt that meditation training has allowed some people to become essentially indifferent to what otherwise would have been unbearable pain.

In the end, boundless empathy is what utilitarianism is.

Some of our mental machinery is exquisitely geared to that function, including the essence-preservation machinery that makes our enemies more readily blameworthy for bad behavior than our allies and makes it easy to witness the suffering of our enemies with indifference.

When people feel like fighting, they are pretty good at coming

So too with the case of the snoring yogi in the previous chapter. As long as I identified with my dislike of him, I was obeying natural selection's instructions to consider myself special (certainly more special than a guy who wants to catch up on his sleep when I'm trying to meditate!).