Quotes About Empathy

You take something that isn't your own and you breathe life into it. You create it—and it becomes your creation. You are an agent to help my brother express the finest kind of love.

Reading is an exercise in empathy. To read is to enter another world in a way different from any other art form.

He was a husband. There is a name for what he is now. Widower. He had never fully appreciated, in all the years he took patients' medical histories, how it must feel to check that box.

She doesn't know how to talk about herself. She is very, very good at telling other people's stories. She is known, as a producer, to be an unusually good reader of scripts when it comes to character and motivation. She has an excellent sense of structure. But her cheeks redden and she stumbles when she tries to share in meetings. It's as if the whole of her life rushes in, and she doesn't know where to begin.

It's wonderful to be loved but its profound to be understood.

It is a measure of true adulthood that we are able to imagine our parents as the people they may have been before us.

I felt so skinless at times! Things hit me so hard!

I don't think that we have any right to have a sort of generalized criticism, if not hatred, of the people who hated us, because then we only descend to the level of those people who persecuted us for so many years. New

the number-one job is to take care of each other. I didn't always know that, but I know it now.

I have saved your life on no other terms than I would be glad to be saved myself: and it may, one time or other, be my lot to be taken up in the same condition. Besides, said he, when I carry you to the Brazils, so great a way from your own country, if I should take from you what you have, you will be starved there, and then I only take away that life I have given.

Quanto dovrebbe riflettere chi si lagna della propria condizione e la confronta con quella degli altri, senza sapere che un giorno il Cielo potrebbe costringerlo a fare il cambio e a riconoscere troppo tardi di aver perduto la felicità!

si los hombres compararan su situación con la de otros que están en peores circunstancias y no con los que están mejor, se sentirían agradecidos y no se quejarían de sus desgracias.

Aber, sprach sie noch immer lächelnd, dieser Verdienst kann dir nicht Nahrung und Kleider schaffen, wer wird denn dem kleinen Fräulein die Kleider kaufen?

He knew as well the stories of generosity and courage and self-sacrifice: the clergy who encouraged and comforted all who came – including the outcast Catholics, Jews, and Dissenters; the doctors who tended the poor without fees; the officials working quickly to calm panic and stave off disaster; the watchmen, the deadcart drivers, the 'buryers' at the pits; the parents and children and servants and friends who encouraged, comforted, tended, worked, saved, and mourned.

We transmit and catch moods from each other in what amounts to a subterranean economy of the psyche in which some encounters are toxic, some nourishing.

For leaders to get results they need all three kinds of focus. Inner focus attunes us to our intuitions, guiding values, and better decisions. Other focus smooths our connections to the people in our lives. And outer focus lets us navigate in the larger world. A leader tuned out of his internal world will be rudderless; one blind to the world of others will be clueless; those indifferent to the larger systems within which they operate will be blindsided.

when we hope to be a You, being treated like an It, as though we do not matter, carries a particularly harsh sting.

This harkens back to Freud's famous question, "What does woman want?" As Epstein answers, "She wants a partner who cares what she wants.

Indeed, laughter may be the shortest distance between two brains, an unstoppable infectious spread that builds an instant social bond.

The most powerful form of nondefensive listening, of course, is empathy: actually hearing the feelings behind what is being said.

Emotional aptitude is a meta-ability , determining how well we can use whatever other skills we have , including raw inellect .

we have a bit of self-interest in relieving the misery of others. One school of modern economic theory, following Hobbes, argues that people give to charities in part because of the pleasure they get from imagining either the relief of those they benefit or their own relief from alleviating their sympathetic distress.

It is with the heart that one sees rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye. ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY, The Little Prince

A series of studies by Marian Radke-Yarrow and Carolyn Zahn-Waxler at the National Institute of Mental Health showed that a large part of this difference in empathic concern had to do with how parents disciplined their children. Children, they found, were more empathic when the discipline included calling strong attention to the distress their misbehavior caused someone else: "Look how sad you've made her feel" instead of "That was naughty.