Quotes About Empathy

I realize that the times I have known some sort of inner peace in my life, those have always been times when I focused on helping others more than myself... babysitting, cooking dinner for my family, cleaning up the house, talking to a friend on the phone and just listening to them vent about something or other without offering an opinion or judging. Those have been the moments when I get to stop obsessing about myself and really feel a sense of liberation. 'Freedom from the bondage of self...

It seems like there is something about sharing your insides with the world that gives other people strength and hope and helps them not to feel so alone.

Hey, man, helping you is how I stay alive. Never forget that.

Nic, the only thing that ever really gives us any genuine satisfaction is caring for other people. It doesn't matter how popular we are or anything. The only thing that actually makes life more fulfilling is our love for others.

I don't want you to be interested in my life. I want you to be interested in me.

It made me realize how unimaginative I had always been about battered wives. Disaster creeps up, a tidal wave on the tourist beach. By the time you can see it, you are powerless or unable to resist it and it rolls you up and away.

you're one of those friends I can be silent with.

would say that a lot of the science that ends up helping people is undertaken by men and women who are doing it for its own sake, and that going around weeping for those who suffer doesn't mean you're actually doing anything to help them.

the public knew, he thought, his feet in their heavy boots sliding among the syringes, if they knew how some people lived and how they died.

Frieda smiled. "It's lesson number one in therapist school," she said. "It's the way of avoiding being put on the spot. So that whatever your patient says to you, you just say, 'What do you mean by that?' And then you're off the hook.

It was a relief to be helping someone instead of being the one in need.

In her scorching memoir, Keeper, about the two years she lived with her mother-in-law and her rapidly worsening Alzheimer's disease, Andrea Gillies asks, 'What it is that dementia takes away?' And she answers herself: 'Everything; every last thing we reassure ourselves that nothing could take away from us.

To want to die rather than be dependent and helpless; to try to kill the person you love the most because their future seems mere torment: what does this say about our culture?

During dementia's end-game, a person goes to a place where we cannot follow them and can barely guess at. The bursts of lucidity that those with catastrophic memory loss can sometimes have are like bright, sharp flashes of lightning over a blasted landscape.

Vi blir faktiskt mer ledsna när våra familjemedlemmar är ledsna än om främmande människor är ledsna.

The experience most certainly changes your perspective. The things that we share in our world are far more valuable than those which divide us."11

Ensamhet sprider sig också mellan grannar, så att tio extra dagar med ensamhetskänslor leder till två extra dagar för personen på andra sidan staketet. Grannar och vänner som bor mer än en och en halv kilometer bort överför däremot inte ensamhetskänslor till varandra.

A key feature of awe, psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt have argued, is that it quiets self-interest and makes individuals feel part of the larger whole. 12

One night he had shared his quarters with a wounded drummer boy, protecting the child from cold.

I looked below and saw my people there, and all were well and happy except one, and he was lying like the dead -- and that one was myself.

It's much easier to be convincing if you care about your topic. Figure out what's important to you about your message and speak from the heart.

All conversation, big or small, is about painting word pictures of your experiences for other people. The more

Quando as pessoas gostam de você, elas veem o melhor em você. Quando não, tendem a ver o pior. É senso comum, na verdade. Se

when you see someone injured, the primitive pain centers in your own brain activate almost instantaneously—the more sophisticated mental process of empathizing with psychological suffering unfolds much more slowly.