Quotes About Empathy

When we started out, I kept wondering, what are the rules of philanthropy? And it turns out that there are rules for it. And nobody could talk about that. There is no set formula for this because anything with a human being cannot have a formula.

I tell my students, it's not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself, somebody next door who looks like you. What's more difficult is to identify with someone you don't see, who's very far away, who's a different color, who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.

We don't woo our wives with clubs. We don't leave old folks on ice floes. And maybe the time has come to quit diving into rip tides to save people we don't know. We've outgrown a lot of survival-of-the-fittest strategies, and risking our lives for strangers might be one of them.

I think, when I started writing songs, my voice just became another tool. It wasn't something that I was going to try desperately to woo a listener. As long as I'm using my voice in a way that helps people understand what I'm trying to say, then I feel like I'm doing all right.

You may never learn the names of any of the people you talk to in a dog park, even after many, many hours spent there with them, and many hours of conversation. But if - knock on wood - anything should ever happen to your dog, these nameless non-strangers will rally, sympathize, offer to help, and hold your hand. I know this from experience.

There's a lot of worse things going on in the world than me hitting a bad five wood.

I don't have contempt for Tiger Woods.

My sense of my own superiority over many of my classmates would have been much more muted if I knew that they had seen me failing miserably at woodwork or cross-stitch.

I judge a man by the way he treats people who don't count. Woody Hayes was nice to a lot of people he couldn't ever use.

The calling of the humanities is to make us truly human in the best sense of the word.

There are glimpses of heaven to us in every act, or thought, or word, that raises us above ourselves.

You have a responsibility to make inclusion a daily thought, so we can get rid of the word 'inclusion.'

Freedom is an indivisible word. If we want to enjoy it, and fight for it, we must be prepared to extend it to everyone, whether they are rich or poor, whether they agree with us or not, no matter what their race or the color of their skin.

Many a friendship, long, loyal, and self-sacrificing, rested at first on no thicker a foundation than a kind word.

Tolerance is another word for indifference.

Change begins with understanding and understanding begins by identifying oneself with another person: in a word, empathy. The arts enable us to put ourselves in the minds, eyes, ears and hearts of other human beings.

'Empathy' is the latest code word for liberal activism, for treating the Constitution as malleable clay to be kneaded and molded in whatever form justices want. It represents an expansive view of the judiciary in which courts create policy that couldn't pass the legislative branch or, if it did, would generate voter backlash.

A word of advice is, when you judge someone, it doesn't define the person that you're judging. It defines you.

A word, for example, that is negative, pejorative, and has caused more pain and suffering is 'illegitimate.' But every person has a mother and father. It is another way we let society hurt others.

Word hark, be kind, and good things will happen for sure.

Until you have cultivated the habit of saying some kind word of those whom you do not admire, you will be neither successful nor happy.

When you hear the word 'disabled,' people immediately think about people who can't walk or talk or do everything that people take for granted. Now, I take nothing for granted. But I find the real disability is people who can't find joy in life and are bitter.

It is violence when we use a sharp word, when we make a gesture to brush away a person. So violence isn't merely organized butchery in the name of God, in the name of society or country. Violence is much more subtle, much deeper.

It's better to use a curse word than to hurt somebody else, I find.