Quotes About Empathy

Maybe that's the fate of someone who spends his life delving into other people's minds – listening to their worst fears, unmasking their flaws and discovering their motives. Maybe a man like that begins to rust or seize up – haunted by too many ghosts in the machine.

Women think they want a man but instead they want

People think they want the truth, but the opposite is true. Honesty is mean and rough and ugly, while lying can be kinder, softer and more humane. It's not honesty that we want, but consideration and respect.

Have you ever had a patient who didn't want to be gay?" "Yes." "Did you try to fix them?" "There was nothing to fix. I can't change someone's sexuality. I help them come to terms with who they are. I help them cope with their own nature.

Sometimes when a man feels bad about himself, he doesn't want to be with a woman who looks at him with nothing but love. Instead he wants to lie on top of a woman who knows how nasty and shallow and faithless he can be … a woman who doesn't put him on a pedestal or expect him to be a knight in shining armour … a woman who's happy with the worst he can be.

The need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens—second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter.

Possessing a theory of mind means that an individual ascribes mental states, such as purpose, intention, knowledge, beliefs, doubts, pretending, liking, and so forth, to himself and to others.

It was important for Bob Noyce to be liked, which paralyzed his ability to fire people or reposition them downward, even when the company and those who worked for it were at risk.

Education, from Addams' perspective, must not merely make us more adept at defending ourselves against those with different agendas. Education should increase our powers of empathy and our ability to act in concert with others.

Never let an old person live in your body.

If you're decent to others, then you're decent to yourself.

I never traded my humanity for my long life, Doctor. I've always remembered my roots....You worked so hard to be like your Elder master that you've forgotten what it is like to feel human - to be human. And we humans...have the capacity to feel another creature's pain. It is what lifted humani above the Elders, it is what made them great.

She knew then that whatever he was -- whoever he was -- he had not lost his humanity.

This is what I have always loved about you humans. You are essentially good." "Not everyone," Machiavelli said tiredly. "No. Not everyone. But enough.

You pity me?" "You are not living, you are surviving.

hate is the most useless of all emotions.

Why do there have to be men like that, men who enjoy another man's dying?

When you see a struggle that you may be having personally put on a big screen and in a roomful of people, then it makes you feel less crazy or alone, because you're seeing that other people are dealing with it too. You get to see in this imaginary scenario how people might try and answer some questions or deal with some problems.

the humanity of whales.

As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races. —Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 18711

Morality involves how we think and act toward other sentient beings and whether our thoughts and actions are right (good) or wrong (bad) with regard to their survival and flourishing.

As noted previously, a principle of moral good is this: if other persons are involved in an action, then always act with their good in mind, and never act in a way that it leads to their loss or suffering (through force or fraud).

Perspective-taking is the psychological foundation underlying the capacity for empathy. To judge the rightness or wrongness of an action against another, one must first take the perspective of that other sentient being.

And sometimes, by focusing on a life to come, we miss what we have in this life. It is a different source of hope, but it is hope nonetheless: hope that human intelligence, combined with compassion, can solve our myriad problems and enhance the quality of each life; hope that historical progress continues on its march toward greater freedom and acceptance for all humans; and hope that reason and science as well as love and empathy can help us understand our universe, our world, and ourselves.