Quotes About Empathy

The intolerant "true believer" is a menace to any field, yet I suspect each one of us finds traces of that person in ourself.

There is no doubt that I am selective in my listening, hence "directive" if people wish to accuse me of this. I am centered in the group member who is speaking, and am unquestionably much less interested in the details of his quarrel with his wife, or of his difficulties on the job, or his disagreement with what has just been said, than in the meaning these experience have for him now and the feeling they arouse in him. It is to these meanings and feelings that I try to respond.

I speak as a person, from a context of personal experience and personal learnings.

When I accept myself as I am, then I change. I believe that I have learned this from my clients as well as within my own experience—that we cannot change, we cannot move away from what we are, until we thoroughly accept what we are. Then change seems to come about almost unnoticed.

When asked a question, I try to consult my own feelings. If I sense it as being real and containing no other message than the question, then I will try my best to answer it. I feel no social compulsion, however, to answer simply because it is phrased as a question. There may be other message in it far more important than the question itself.

Each person is an island unto himself, in a very real sense; and he can only build bridges to other islands if he is first of all willing to be himself and permitted to be himself. So I find that when I can accept another person, which means specifically accepting the feelings and attitudes and beliefs that he has as a real and vital part of him, then I am assisting him to become a person: and there seems to me great value in this.

Experience drove home the fact that to act consistently acceptant, for example, if in fact I was feeling annoyed or skeptical or some other non-acceptant feeling, was certain in the long run to be perceived as inconsistent or untrustworthy. I have come to recognize that being trustworthy does not demand that I be rigidly consistent but that I be dependably real.

The term "congruent" is one I have used to describe the way I would like to be. By this I mean that whatever feeling or attitude I am experiencing would be matched by my awareness of that attitude. When this is true, then I am a unified or integrated person in that moment, and hence I can be whatever I deeply am. This is a reality which I find others experience as dependable.

Inviting people to laugh with you while you are laughing at yourself is a good thing to do. You may be a fool but you're the fool in charge.

Brain scans, [McGonigal] said, have shown that there are regions of the brain that activate when we think about other people, and other regions that activate when we think about ourselves. In cases where people don't feel much connection to their future selves, the areas of the brain that light up when they are asked to think about themselves in the future are—guess what?—the same ones as when they think about other people."1

In a person who is open to experience each stimulus is freely relayed through the nervous system, without being distorted by any process of defensiveness.

Why do human egos seem so threatened by the thought that other animals think and feel? Is it because acknowledging the mind of another makes it harder to abuse them?

humans are not the measure of all things.

Parental care, satisfaction, friendship, compassion, and grief didn't just suddenly appear with the emergence of modern humans. All began their journey in pre-human beings. Our brain's provenance is inseparable from other species' brains in the long cauldron of living time. And thus, so is our mind.

The moon is a friend for the lonesome to talk to.

The moon is friend for the lonesome to talk to.

From the equality of rights springs identity of our highest interests; you cannot subvert your neighbor's rights without striking a dangerous blow at your own.

The errors which proceed from a spirit of benevolence are the worst.

The problem is not that dolphins are dumber than we thought, but that our anthropomorphism inevitably makes it hard to understand an intelligence other than our own.

When we see faces, we don't just recognize them; we also make the same face, if only for a moment.

The good thing about being with a woman who has amnesia is that the conversation gets to be all about you

Oh, well, she decided as her eyes began to close, it is better to love foolishly than to hate bitterly. I hope I am wiser than I was and more kind.

The thing to hold on to in forgiving is that most often the people who are hurting us do not know what they are doing. In fact it is fair to say that none of us knows the impact of our actions in relationships, at least for a lot of the time. We are all unaware of our power to hurt and to heal.

E' cattiva la gente che non ha provato il dolore, perchè quando si prova il dolore, non si può più voler male a nessuno