Quotes About Empathy

Becoming acutely lonely, the experiment found, was as stressful as experiencing a physical attack.

This is what I would want to tell my teenage self. You have to turn now to all the other wounded people around you, and find a way to connect with them, and build a home with these people, together - a place where you are bonded to one another and find meaning in your lives together. We have been tribeless and disconnected for so long now. It's time for us all to come home.

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.

He explained that when you're very young, if you get upset or angry, you need an adult to soothe you and calm you down. Over time, as you grow up, if you're soothed enough, you learn to soothe yourself. You internalise the reassurance and relaxation your family gave to you. But stressed out parents, through no fault of their own, find it harder to soothe their children because they are so amped up themselves.

Rufus tells his patients when they come to him feeling deeply depressed or anxious: You're not crazy to feel so distressed. You're not broken. You're not defective. He sometimes quotes the Eastern philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti,26 who explained: "It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.

It's the twenty-first-century version of Marie Antoinette saying, "Let them eat cake." Let them be present.

fiction is a kind of empathy gym,

The goal was to offer the patient two things at the same time. The first was an opportunity to describe the traumatic experience—to craft a story about it, so the patient could make sense of it. As this experiment began, one of the things they discovered almost immediately is that many of the patients had literally never before acknowledged what happened to them to another human being.

We're all on the same ball of mud and water that is heading toward a catastrophic end potentially. If we are going to solve these problems, we can't do it alone," he said. "That's why I think empathy is so valuable.

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

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

A compassionate approach leads to less addiction.

Depression and anxiety might, in one way, be the sanest reaction you have.6 It's a signal, saying—you shouldn't have to live this way, and if you aren't helped to find a better path, you will be missing out on so much that is best about being human.

Your pain makes sense

have become the first humans to ever dismantle our tribes. As a result, we have been left alone on a savanna we do not understand, puzzled by our own sadness.

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.

For millennia, humans have talked about something called the Golden Rule. It's the idea that you should do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Tim, I think, has discovered something we should call the I-Want-Golden-Things Rule.17 The more you think life is about having stuff and superiority and showing it off, the more unhappy, and the more depressed and anxious, you will be.

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.

It's worth repeating. Being deeply lonely seemed to cause as much stress as being punched by a stranger.

You too will become more perceptive, open, and empathetic. If, by contrast, you expose yourself for hours a day to the disconnected fragments of shrieking and fury that dominate social media, your thoughts will start to be shaped like that.