Empathy Quotes - Page 19

• It can be very dangerous to see things from somebody else's point of view without the proper training.

  Douglas Adams

  Views, Training, Point Of View

  Douglas Adams (2012). “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Trilogy of Five”, p.710, Pan Macmillan

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• I don't know, I don't care, and it doesn't make any difference.

  Jack Kerouac

  Wisdom, Caring, Differences

  Jack Kerouac (1999). “Selected Letters, 1957-1969”, Viking Adult

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• ...these stories are a kind of beacon. By making stories full of empathy and amusement and the sheer pleasure of discovering the world, these writers reassert the fact that we live in a world where joy and empathy and pleasure are all around us, there for the noticing.

  Ira Glass

  Joy, Stories, World

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• It's the hardest thing in the world to go on being aware of someone else's pain.

  Pat Barker

  Pain, Goes On, World

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• The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Destiny, Men, Understanding

  Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.43, Ultramarine Publishing

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• All novels . . . are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: what is the self? How can it be grasped?

  Milan Kundera

  Character, Self, Enigma

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• Of course genes can’t pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought. Each of us is dealt a unique hand of tastes and aptitudes, like curiosity, ambition, empathy, a thirst for novelty or for security, a comfort level with the social or the mechanical or the abstract. Some opportunities we come across click with our constitutions and set us along a path in life.

  Steven Pinker

  Ambition, Unique, Opportunity

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• Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel empathy for people we've never met, living lives we couldn't possibly experience for ourselves, because the book puts us inside the character's skin.

  Ann Patchett

  Live Life, Book, Reading

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• What is real to me is the power of our awareness when we are focused on something beyond ourselves. It is a shaft of light shining in a dark corner. Our ability to shift our perceptions and seek creative alternatives to the conondrums of modernity is in direct proportion to our empathy. Can we imagine, witness, and ultimately feel the suffering of another?

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Real, Dark, Light

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• Encouragement requires empathy and seeing the world from your spouse's perspective. We must first learn what is important to our spouse. Only then can we give encouragement. With verbal encouragement, we are trying to communicate, "I know. I care. I am with you. How can I help?" We are trying to show that we believe in him and in his abilities. We are giving credit and praise.

  Gary Chapman

  Encouragement, Believe, Giving

  Gary Chapman (2010). “The 5 Love Languages/Things I Wish I'd Known Before We Got Married Set”, p.30, Moody Publishers

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• Indeed, when I came to Italy, I expected to encounter a certain amount of resentment, but have received instead empathy from most Italians. In any reference to George Bush, people only nod to Berlusconi, saying","We understand how it is - we have one, too.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  People, Encounters, Resentment

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2010). “The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims”, p.106, A&C Black

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• I felt the kind of desperation, I think, that cancels the possibility of empathy...that makes you unkind.

  Sue Miller

  Thinking, Kind, Desperation

  Sue Miller (2014). “While I Was Gone: rejacketed”, p.31, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque.

  Susan Sontag

  Cities, Joy, World

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.50, Macmillan

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• That only a few, under any circumstances, protest against the injustice of long-established laws and customs, does not disprove the fact of the oppressions, while the satisfaction of the many, if real only proves their apathy and deeper degradation.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Real, Law, Long

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1898). “Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences, 1815-1897”, p.318, UPNE

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• Training moments occur when both parents and children do their jobs. The parent's job is to make the rule. The child's job is to break the rule. The parent then corrects and disciplines. The child breaks the rule again, and the parent manages the consequences and empathy that then turn the rule into reality and internal structure for the child.

  Henry Cloud

  Jobs, Children, Reality

  Henry Cloud, John Townsend (2009). “Boundaries with Kids: When to Say Yes, How to Say No”, p.151, Harper Collins

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• Some make their worlds without knowing it. Their universes are just sesame seeds and three-day weekends and dial tones and skinned knees and physics and driftwood and emerald earrings and books dropped in bathtubs and holes in guitars and plastic and empathy and hardwood and heavy water and high black stockings and the history of the Vikings and brass and obsolescence and burnt hair and collapsed souffles and the impossibility of not falling in love in an art museum with the person standing next to you looking at the same painting and all the other things that just happen and are.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Falling In Love, Art, Book

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• A good novel is one that shows the complexity of individuals, and creates enough space for all these characters to have a voice; in this way a novel is called democratic - not that it advocates democracy but that by nature it is so. Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels - the biggest sin is to be blind to others' problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence.

  Azar Nafisi

  Pain, Lying, Heart

  Azar Nafisi (2003). “Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books”, p.132, Random House

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• When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.

  Martin Buber

  Love, Two, People

  "Where is God in the Flood?" by Rabbi Avi Strausberg, www.huffingtonpost.com. October 17, 2017.

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• This is the most enormous extension of vision of which life is capable: the projection of itself into other lives. This is the lonely, magnificent power of humanity. It is . . . the supreme epitome of the reaching out.

  Loren Eiseley

  Lonely, Humanity, Vision

  Loren Eiseley (2011). “The Immense Journey: An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man and Nature”, p.46, Vintage

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• Man wishes to be confirmed in his being by man, and wishes to have a presence in the being of the other…. Secretly and bashfully he watches for a YES which allows him to be and which can come to him only from one human person to another.

  Martin Buber

  Men, Wish, Watches

  Martin Buber, Judith Buber Agassi (1999). “Martin Buber on Psychology and Psychotherapy: Essays, Letters, and Dialogue”, p.16, Syracuse University Press

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

  George Saunders

  Heart, My Heart, Depends

  George Saunders (2007). “The Braindead Megaphone”, p.120, Penguin

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• Feeling one "has"; love occurs.

  Martin Buber

  Feelings

  Martin Buber (2013). “I and Thou”, p.88, eBookIt.com

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• ...treat people with understanding when you can, and fake it when you can't until you do understand.

  Kim Harrison

  Kindness, People, Fake

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• What do you want with these special Jewish pains? I feel as close to the wretched victims of the rubber plantations in Putamayo and the blacks of Africa with whose bodies the Europeans play ball… I have no special corner in my heart for the ghetto: I am at home in the entire world, where there are clouds and birds and human tears.

  Rosa Luxemburg

  Pain, Home, Heart

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• Sympathy is what you have for someone after they die, pity you have for someone when they don't have a date to the biggest dance of the year. Empathy is what I do to you when you judge me. Envy is having pity on yourself. Can you discern the rest for yourself?

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Years, Envy, Judging

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