Quotes About Empathy

The only successful way to write, and the only one I have found, is to be the character. Give up on trying to control them. Writers always talk about hearing voices. That's what they mean.

If you are not diverse and you are not listening to all voices and have your ear to the ground, you're not going to make the best decisions.

What I'm interested in doing now is to go and give voices that are not being heard a platform and to sort of bring people into people's homes that you think you may hate or despise.

If I can laugh with people, it makes me feel safe with them. If I feel someone has no sense of humour, I find it really scary. I do it with the kids as well: put on stupid voices to lighten up the spirit or gee them along to do something.

I have been 'absorbing' people - their voices, their mannerisms - all my life, to the point where I am a sort of Frankenstein of different people. My own speaking voice is, in fact, a mixture of how my two best mates speak, because they are cool, and I am not.

I'm just trying to humanise situations and represent voices that aren't being represented.

In 'Underground,' you have to write for everyone, even the bad guys. People need to laugh and love and have voices and do bad things. Even slave owners need to be people.

And the purpose of small talk is not to be controversial, clever or even interesting. It's simply to fill the silent void with a small gesture of common humanity. It's a spoken smile, a verbal handshake.

One must either take an interest in the human situation or else parade before the void.

It's incredible to me that any two individual minds, trapped in their skulls and bodies and histories and unique experiences, are able to reach across the void between them and touch at all.

My wife was an excellent mother, her loss has left a big void in my son's life, and those are shoes that I cannot fill. The loss of a parent has not been easy on him.

Why do people who consider themselves good communicators often fail to actually hear each other? Often it's due to a mismatch of styles: To someone who prefers to vent, someone who prefers to explain seems patronizing; explainers experience venters as volatile.

Axl did sometimes have volatile actions, but I knew that guy as a whole - all the good stuff, too.

Whether by my own volition or otherwise, I was given a year-and-a-half break after Dad passed. It was kind of like an elephant in the room, and everyone was giving me space, whether I wanted it or not.

Some people think that you have to be the loudest voice in the room to make a difference. That is just not true. Often, the best thing we can do is turn down the volume. When the sound is quieter, you can actually hear what someone else is saying. And that can make a world of difference.

What we need in medical schools is not to teach empathy, as much as to preserve it - the process of learning huge volumes of information about disease, of learning a specialized language, can ironically make one lose sight of the patient one came to serve; empathy can be replaced by cynicism.

As a mentor, you have to be willing to put yourself in your mentee's shoes to understand their struggles that they deal with. It's not supposed to turn into a pity party by any means, but empathy speaks volumes to a mentee in need of help rather than forced sympathy.

To have charitable support given by people voluntarily to support their fellow citizens, I think, is rather uplifting and shows what a good, compassionate country we are.

When our neighbor's personality possesses harsh qualities, we show our love by not voluntarily provoking those qualities in any way. Past experience shows us what upsets a person, so in their presence we are careful not to do or say those things that cause anger. We are self-effacing.

We all, as individuals, can and should act compassionately and charitably. We can volunteer our time, energy, and dollars to help the underprivileged. We can feed the hungry, house the homeless. Most of us feel a moral and ethical responsibility to do so - to 'do unto others.'

I used to work as a volunteer in a hospice, but I don't have any nursing skills or cooking skills or anything, so I was what they call an escort. I would take people to the support groups every night, and I would have to sit sort of on the sidelines so I could take them back to hospice at the end of the meeting.

People who volunteer at the recycling center or soup kitchen through a church or neighborhood group can come to feel part of something 'larger.' Such a sense of belonging calls on a different part of a self than the market calls on. The market calls on our sense of self-interest. It focuses us on what we 'get.'

In most cases, no one asks what I think, and so for me to be ready to volunteer it unprompted, I have to feel very ready to accept whatever is coming next.

Each one of us can do a good deed, every day and everywhere. In hospitals in desperate need of volunteers, in homes for the elderly where our parents and grandparents are longing for a smile, a listening ear, in the street, in our workplaces and especially at home.