Empathy Quotes - Page 8

My heart goes out to him. Sort of. Because empathy depends on how you've spent your day.

Empathy takes time, and efficiency is for things, not people.

Empathy cannot by definition oppress anyone.

The most important thing is that we need to be understood. We need someone to be able to listen to us and to understand us. Then we will suffer less.

To do this, you can bring in nothing from the past. So the more psychology you've studied, the harder it will be to empathize. The more you know the person, the harder it will be to empathize. Diagnoses and past experiences can instantly knock you off the board. This doesn't mean denying the past. Past experiences can stimulate what's alive in this moment. But are you present to what was alive then or what the person is feeling and needing in this moment?

In the midst of a burning-hot shaming, calling for patience and context and understanding and empathy can really land you in trouble.

Not to him who is offensive to us are we most unfair, but to him who doth not concern us at all.

Empathy as a complex emotion is different. It requires awareness of the other person's feelings and of one's own reactions. The appropriate reaction may not be to cry when another person cries, but to reassure them, or even to leave them alone.

The possibility that empathy resides in parts of the brain so ancient that we share them with rats should give pause to anyone comparing politicians with those poor, underestimated creatures.

Recent breakthroughs in science show we have just the capacities we need to face our planet's challenges. We're "soft-wired" for cooperation, empathy, fairness, along with a deep need to "make a dent," as social philosopher Erich Fromm put it. My hunch is that one reason depression is a global pandemic is that the dominant mental map denies so many of us expression of these deep needs and capacities.

As an artist I am attracted by decadence, by those who exhaust their lives in the shallow pursuits of pleasure. Occasionally, I feel that spiritually I participate in all these kinds of lives.

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.

It takes a great man to make a great listener

The mind must be allowed to settle undisturbed over the object in order to secrete the pearl.

Pain shared is pain lessened; joy shared is joy increased. Thus do we refute entropy.

Feeling one "has"; love occurs.

When I confront a human being as my Thou and speak the basic word I-Thou to him, then he is no thing among things nor does he consist of things. He is no longer He or She, a dot in the world grid of space and time, nor a condition to be experienced and described, a loose bundle of named qualities. Neighborless and seamless, he is Thou and fills the firmament. Not as if there were nothing but he; but everything else lives in his light.

All actual life is encounter.

Empathy isn't as hard as it sounds because people have a lot of the same feelings. And it helps to understand other people because then you can actually care about them sometimes. And help them. And have a friend.

Sex and intimacy are not the same: You can have sex all your life and never be intimate with a person. There has to be empathy in the relationship. You have to enjoy seeing through their eyes. When you're with them, you're there and not thinking about what you're gonna do tomorrow.

If moderation is a fault, then indifference is a crime.

The silence of prayer is the silence of listening.

A little anger is a good thing if it isn't on your own behalf, if it's for others deserving of your anger, your empathy.

In this sullen apathy neither true wisdom nor true happiness can be found.

If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.