Quotes About Empathy

The 'unsharable' nature of pain, Scarry goes on to argue, triggers a chain reaction that isolates the bearer of pain and frequently leads to a lack of compassion, alienation and often even cruelty on the part of those who are not afflicted and lack the capacity to acknowledge, let alone comprehend its existence.

Kahlo's paintings offer a visual vocabulary with which trauma and pain can be transmitted or communicated with dignity and compassion. Through the language of her innovative art Kahlo gives voice to silenced, unresolved traumata. She thus obliterates the barrier between the individual experiencing pain and the viewer, and evokes empathy for our shared human fragility.

Don't get me wrong: I've worked, over the course of 14 years, with certain actors that are really just not nice as people, so you don't really care what happens to their show. But someone like Rachael Harris, you hope that woman wins an Emmy.

Everyone kept saying, 'The terrorists didn't win. You won! We won! You survived!' That's just weird to me. Nobody wins in these situations. I don't see winners and losers in tragic events.

Remember the rights of the savage, as we call him. Remember that the happiness of his humble home, remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God, as can be your own.

I remember my dad took my ice skates. One day I asked my mum: 'Where are my ice skates?' because I loved to skate in the winter. And she said through tears: 'Dad is selling them now... we don't have money for this week.'

I don't just live in a bubble in Los Angeles. I'm on the road all the time. I say hello to people everywhere. That way, you get to see what despair is around the holidays. People are making terrible choices: Do I have heat in the winter or food on the table? Decisions between filling the gas tank or buying a gift for a kid.

Look - I'm an African-American. I'm black. But I'm just looking at the character and trying to find his soul, his energy. If you can wipe away the blanket of skin and flesh that people tend to see, and look inside for the essence of the soul, then that's the work I'm doing. That's the work I always do.

When we used to go to the car-wash where people would wipe the windows, my dad would go out and help them and then tip them as well, so I learned my empathy from my dad, and my mum is very empathetic too, but in a very stern way; she will always check my ego.

These poor kids in Baghdad have no running water, no showers. They wipe with baby wipes. My heart goes out to them.

I was forced to lie to my father by doctors and relatives. I made that choice and agreed with them, and I will never, ever get over it. If I hear a lie in my life with my children, with my wife, my work, my audiences, I want to annihilate myself, vaporize myself, and wipe myself off the face of the earth.

If you've ever felt oppressed on any level, there's something from 'The Wire' that you can take and identify with.

What we were all always saying with 'The Wire' was that there's a whole group of people that America just sort of wants to throw away. They want to forget about them, and if they could, they'd get rid of them. They are Americans - they're worth saving; they're worth helping.

A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all people. We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don't function as we were meant to. We break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache. We hurt others. We get sick.

Altruism is innate, but it's not instinctual. Everybody's wired for it, but a switch has to be flipped.

That's the thing: when I listen on public transport, my headphones act as a separator - a wired barrier between me and the nearest people. Yet my podcasts drag me through the depths of human nature.

A vast percentage of the human race is literally not wired neurologically to get irony. Well more than half of humanity takes life at face value, which is to me terrifying.

There's something really earnest inside me all the time. It's not a cool or fun way to be. Sometimes I would like to experience being someone who's not wired the way I'm wired.

If you're in somebody's head for 12 hours a day for four weeks, it's like your brain actually wires itself to start thinking that way.

It's really humbling and gratifying to see that people are finally realizing that we are talented and we have things to say and that our stories are just like your stories. There's no reason that anybody from Wisconsin or Turkey can't relate to 'Atlanta.'

Being bi-racial and being from the country, I can talk to guys like Travis Frederick from Wisconsin and Doug Free from Wisconsin. And then I can go over and talk to Dez Bryant. I mean, think about the two different standpoints you need to have a real conversation with both, to really understand what they've been through.

Never find fault with the absent.

None knows the weight of another's burden.

Above all, you must fight conceit, envy, and every kind of ill-feeling in your heart.