Quotes on Empathy

International educational exchange is the most significant current project designed to continue the process of humanizing mankind to the point, we would hope, that men can learn to live in peace-eventually even to cooperate in constructive activities rather than compete in a mindless contest of mutual destruction....We must try to expand the boundaries of human wisdom, empathy and perception, and there is no way of doing that except through education.

As in a Russian doll, however, the outer layers always contain an inner core. Instead of evolution having replaced simpler forms of empathy with more advanced ones, the latter are merely elaborations on the former and remain dependent on them. This also means that empathy comes naturally to us. It is not something we only learn later in life, or that is culturally constructed.

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.

I traffic in empathy. I try to be vulnerable with people so they can be vulnerable back. I've always been searching for empathy in other people. It's when I feel most not alone.

There is no reconciliation until you recognize the dignity of the other, until you see their view- you have to enter into the pain of the people. You've got to feel their need.

The hearing that is only in the ears is one thing. The hearing of the understanding is another. But the hearing of the spirit is not limited to any one faculty to the ear, or to the mind.

Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.

Compassion is a living, breathing, organic emotion that vibrates through you and links you to those around you.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

There is zero correlation between IQ and emotional empathy... They're controlled by different parts of the brain.

Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be equally outraged by silence.

All those chemicals that create empathy only work when you are in a room together.

Empathy represents the foundation skill for all the social competencies important for work.

I believe that stories are incredibly important, possibly in ways we don't understand, in allowing us to make sense of our lives, in allowing us to escape our lives, in giving us empathy and in creating the world that we live in.

It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become prey to the active. The conditions upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime, and the punishment of his guilt.

When a person goes to a country and finds their newspapers filled with nothing but good news, he can bet there are good men in jail.

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.

Did you ever notice how difficult it is to argue with someone who is not obsessed with being right?

The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world's problems.

Gentleness, self-sacrifice and generosity are the exclusive possession of no one race or religion.

Suppose you read about a pill that you could take once a day to reduce anxiety and increase your contentment. Would you take it? Suppose further that the pill has a great variety of side effects, all of them good: increased self-esteem, empathy, and trust; it even improves memory. Suppose, finally, that the pill is all natural and costs nothing. Now would you take it? The pill exists. It is meditation.