Quotes About Empathy

I'll meet someone on the street and blurt out my most intimate details. I think everybody secretly - or not so secretly - wants to be understood, and I just want to connect, you know?

I've never understood pity and self-pity as an emotion.

As human beings, what makes us able to empathize with people is a connection that is not necessarily understood mentally.

My wife said to me... you never understood what we were going through back home, did you? And I didn't. And I have to confess that.

I don't think love is a tricky issue at all. Love is best understood when we share: Share time, energy, food, resources, insights, information, whatever. It's usually thought of as something that exists between two people, but that's just because it's easier to see and feel in the space between them. Each person is sharing a lot with the other.

That's important, apologizing, listening, you know, I think the teens I speak with, most of them don't feel understood. They feel like they're being lectured to all the time.

Nirvana is next level. The songs are really cool to connect with on a more mature level, and I don't think I really understood that when I was 15.

I believe if people understood each other more, if people took the time and realize it's not 'all about me' and I'm on a big planet with a lot of other people and concerns, maybe we can learn how to get along with each other.

I've never understood people who treat their loved ones worse and with less respect than they would a total stranger or minor acquaintance.

I never understood when people would say, 'I would die for my child,' but you become so selfless.

In many regions, war and terror prevail. States disintegrate. For many years, we have read about this. We have heard about it. We have seen it on TV. But we had not yet sufficiently understood that what happens in Aleppo and Mosul can affect Essen or Stuttgart. We have to face that now.

My mom is a therapist, and my dad has a doctorate in psychology, and growing up, I felt 'very understood.'

Israeli suffering has to be understood.

Relying on the power of kindness is a sensitive undertaking. The challenge is to inspire people to be kind more often without tainting the selflessness that comes from doing something nice with no ulterior motive.

I think empathy is undervalued in a lot of these comedy writers' rooms.

When you see the neighborhood that you grew up in being underwater, either you can sit down and look like everybody else, or you can get up and go try to help somebody that needs to be helped.

For a guy like Kevin Love who has everything - he has Banana Republic, he's an underwear model, sports body model, this guy's all-everything - for him to say, 'Hey, I go through like all these things like everyone else,' I think it allows for people to relate to him more. I think it's good.

I thought about all those people whose suffering had been erased, and I thought, 'Why can't they speak? Why can't I undo some of that erasure?'

However, for my characters to have depth, they have to be human and complex, have both qualities and flaws, do the right things at times, and at others, things they'll regret having done and not necessarily know how to undo.

Our differences are what make us great. Let us think about how we can extend this appreciation to people of color, undocumented immigrants, and other members of the community.

I've undoubtedly offended people, but in the end, I've learned the people that will understand are the people I want to connect to, anyway.

I don't think of literary novels as self-help documents, although literature undoubtedly saved my life when I was young, enabling me to disappear into all manner of stories, to recognise feelings that I felt alone in.

I'm grateful I know what it's like to be unemployed for long periods of time.

I know what it's like to be on public assistance and to be unemployed. And I know what it's like to be evicted.