Quotes About Empathy

To quote President Harry Truman, "Always be nice to all the people who can't talk back to you. I can't stand a man or woman who bawls out underlings to satisfy

A successful leader, and especially one leading change, treats each member of his team with respect and dignity.

We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people's lives.

We always condemn most in others, he thought, that which we most fear in ourselves.

When one isn't dominated by feelings of separateness from what he's working on, then one can be said to "care" about what he's doing. That is what caring really is, a feeling of identification with what one's doing.

I told her that until he had a real felt need he was just going to resent help, so we went over and sat in the shade and waited.

Persons tend to think and feel exclusively in one mode or the other and in doing so tend to misunderstand and underestimate what the other mode is all about.

John was worried Sylvia would not be up to the discomfort of this and planned to have her fly to Billings, Montana, but Sylvia and I both talked him out of it. I argued that physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong. Then you fasten on to whatever thing is uncomfortable and call that the cause. But if the mood is right, then physical discomfort doesn't mean much. And when thinking about Sylvia's moods and feelings, I couldn't see her complaining.

The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.

What's wrong with technology is that it's not connected in any real way with matters of the spirit and of the heart.

Birisi nankörse ve siz ona nankör olduÄŸunu söylerseniz, en fazla ona bir ad takm?? olursunuz ama hiçbir ÅŸeyi çözmüÅŸ olmazs?n?z.

words are more for strangers, for hospitals, not kin. Little emotional Band-Aids like that aren't what he needs or what's sought…. I don't know what he needs, or what's sought.

If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.

The childhood capacity for empathy progresses from feeling someone's pain because you are them, to feeling for the other person, to feeling as them.

Obviously, oxytocin and vasopressin are the grooviest hormones in the universe. Pour them into the water supply, and people will be more charitable, trusting, and empathic. We'd be better parents and would make love, not war (mostly platonic love, though, since people in relationships would give wide berths to everyone else). Best of all, we'd buy all sorts of useless crap, trusting the promotional banners in stores once oxytocin starts spraying out of the ventilation system.

someone's hand being poked with a needle, and subjects have an "isomorphic sensorimotor" response—hands tense in empathy. Among both whites and blacks, the response is blunted for other-race hands; the more the implicit racism, the more blunting. Similarly, among subjects of both races, there's more activation of the (emotional) medial PFC when considering misfortune befalling a member of their own race than of another race.

the brain becomes literal when we do the flip side of empathy.10 It's painful watching a hated competitor succeed, and we activate the ACC at that time. Conversely, if he fails, we gloat, feel schadenfreude, get pleasure from his pain, and activate dopaminergic reward pathways. Forget "Your pain is my pain." Your pain is my gain.

How's this for a display of human kin selection: Subjects were given a scenario of a bus hurtling toward a human and a nondescript dog, and they could only save one. Whom would they pick? It depended on degree of relatedness, as one progressed from sibling (1 percent chose the dog over the sibling) to grandparent (2 percent) to distant cousin (16 percent) to foreigner (26 percent).55

if some octopus moved in next door, I would feel hostile superiority because I have a spine and it didn't, but that animosity might melt into a sense of kinship when I discovered that the octopus, like me, loved playing Twister as a kid.

Feeling someone else's pain can be more effective for learning than just knowing that they're in pain. At its core the ACC is about self-interest, with caring about that other person in pain as an add-on.

Elie Wiesel, el ganador del Premio Nobel y superviviente de un campo de concentración: «Lo contrario al amor no es el odio; lo contrario es la indiferencia». Las biologías del amor fuerte y del odio fuerte son parecidas en muchos aspectos, tal como veremos.

The most convincing data concern rare humans with damage restricted to the amygdala, either due to a type of encephalitis or a congenital disorder called Urbach-Wiethe disease, or where the amygdala was surgically destroyed to control severe, drug-resistant seizures originating there.5 Such individuals are impaired in detecting angry facial expressions (while being fine at recognizing other emotional states—stay tuned).

If people around you smell scared, your brain tilts toward concluding that you are too.

you can't begin to understand things like aggression, competition, cooperation, and empathy without biology; I say this for the benefit of a certain breed of social scientist who finds biology to be irrelevant and a bit ideologically suspect when thinking about human social behavior.