Quotes About Empathy

he argued that a "very large part of the rancor of political and social strife" springs from the fact that different classes or sections "are so cut off from each other that neither appreciates the other's passions, prejudices, and, indeed, point of view.

FDR, even weakened and near the end of his life, opted to allow disabled veterans to see his true condition. This allowed them to understand the life which could still be before them.

Only people who are capable of loving strongly," Leo Tolstoy wrote, "can also suffer great sorrow; but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heal them.

Wherever a tension needed the solvent of good-will, or friction the oil of benevolence; wherever suspicion needed the antidote of frankness, or wounded pride the disinfectant of a hearty laugh—there Taft was sent.

If he could not go out into the world, the world could come to him.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

Understand the emotional needs of each member of the team.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

Lincoln's abhorrence of hurting another was born of more than simple compassion. He possessed extraordinary empathy—the gift or curse of putting himself in the place of another, to experience what they were feeling, to understand their motives and desires.

Leaders in every field, Roosevelt later wrote, "need more than anything else to know human nature, to know the needs of the human soul; and they will find this nature and these needs set forth as nowhere else by the great imaginative writers, whether of prose or of poetry.

The incident suggests Roosevelt's developing sense of empathy. While Lincoln's seems to have been his by right of birth, Roosevelt slowly expanded his understanding of other people's points of view by going to places that a man of his background typically neither visited nor comprehended.

talk about their work, their families, their lives. He had always loved to talk, but now he learned to listen, and to listen intently, his head nodding in a welcoming way, with an air of sympathetic identification, an attentive posture and manner that would become a lifelong characteristic.

To answer those who asked if Lincoln would reconsider, Douglass gave an emphatic no. "Abraham Lincoln will take no step backward," he insisted. "If he has taught us to confide in nothing else, he has taught us to confide in his word.

An uncommon intuitive capacity and interpersonal intelligence allowed him as a child to read the intentions and desires of his parents, to react appropriately to shifting household moods—gifts that he would nurture and develop in the years ahead.

Sometimes I dislike women I dislike us all because of our capacity for not thinking when it suits us...

It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.

you can only value something if you've experienced it.

But after all, to kind of like people, doc, puts you in a pretty privileged class for a start--so few citizens can afford to really kinda like people.

Victim-eyes of impersonal tragedy, to be impersonal no longer.

We have become desensitized. Watching, night after night, day after day, year after year, the horrors going on all over the world have desensitized us exactly as those soldiers have been deliberately brutalized. No one set out to brutalize us, to make us callous; but that is what we increasingly are.

You won't change her by making fun of her. You just hurt her feelings.

Writing about oneself, one is writing about others, since your problems, pains, pleasures, emotions—and your extraordinary and remarkable ideas—can't be yours alone.

Sarah and William's unhappiness, their quarrelling, had probably attracted the mongol child—yes, yes, of course she knew one shouldn't call them mongol.

Onunla [kedimle] beraber olmak için oturuyorum, bu kendimi yavaÅŸlatmam, telaÅŸ ve endiÅŸeleri defetmem anlam?na geliyor. Bunu yap?nca -onun da keyifli olmas?, bir yerinin aÄŸr?mamas? veya huzursuz olmamamas? gerek - ona eriÅŸmek isteÄŸimin fark?nda olduÄŸunu bana incelikle belli ediyor. Kediye eriÅŸmek, kedinin özüne, onun en iyi yönlerine insan ve kedi, bizi neler ay?r?yorsa onlar? aÅŸmaya çal???yoruz.