Quotes on Empathy

The writing life requires courage, patience, persistence, empathy, openness, and the ability to deal with rejection. It requires the willingness to be alone with oneself. To be gentle with oneself. To look at the world without blinders on. To observe and withstand what one sees. To be disciplined, and at the same time, take risks. To be willing to fail - not just once, but again and again, over the course of a lifetime.

Becoming a reader grows our horizons, our appetite for the good, the true and the beautiful, and our empathy.

Ten people who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent.

Empathy fuels connection; sympathy drives disconnection.

In nonviolent communication, no matter what words others may use to express themselves, we simply listen for their observations, feelings, needs, and requests. Then we may wish to reflect back, paraphrasing what we have understood. We stay with empathy, allowing others the opportunity to fully express themselves before we turn our attention to solutions or requests for relief.

Our culture has accepted two huge lies. The first is that if you disagree with someone’s lifestyle, you must fear or hate them. The second is that to love someone means you agree with everything they believe or do. Both are nonsense. You don’t have to compromise convictions to be compassionate.

Why wouldn't I help? What good reason do I have as a human being with power and a sense of empathy and morality, why wouldn't I do something?

All that has been integrated into NVC has been known for centuries about consciousness, language, communication skills, and use of power that enable us to maintain a perspective of empathy for ourselves and others, even under trying conditions.

We need to take action to develop compassion, to create inner peace within ourselves and to share that inner peace with our family and friends. Peace and warm-heartednes s can then spread through the community just as ripples radiate out across the water when you drop a pebble into a pond

Altruism itself depends on a recognition of the reality of other persons, and on the equivalent capacity to regard oneself as merely one individual among many.

Stairway to Wisdom”) David Brooks detailed the needed ingredients to gaining a deep understanding of a social problem, beginning with the data and moving on to first-hand accounts. The highest rung on his stairway, though, went beyond those: “Empathy opens you up to absorb the good and the bad. Love impels you not just to observe but to seek union—to think as another thinks and feel as another feels.

Cancer is a growth hormone for empathy, and empathy makes us useful to each other in ways we were not, could not have been, before.

Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all - the apathy of human beings.

Happiness doesn't lie in conspicuous consumption and the relentless amassing of useless crap. Happiness lies in the person sitting beside you and your ability to talk to them. Happiness is clear-headed human interaction and empathy. Happiness is home. And home is not a house-home is a mythological conceit. It is a state of mind. A place of communion and unconditional love. It is where, when you cross its threshold, you finally feel at peace.

We live in a culture that discourages empathy. A culture that too often tells us our principle goal in life is to be rich, thin, young, famous, safe, and entertained.

Our goal is to create a quality of empathic connection that allows everyone's needs to be met.

I have a very strong feeling that the opposite of love is not hate - it's apathy. It's not giving a damn.

I want us to organize, to tell the personal stories that create empathy, which is the most revolutionary emotion. The truth of the mater is that hierarchy and violence can't be remedied by more hierarchy and violence. The end doesn't justify the means, the means we choose decide the end we get. The means are the end.

People don't listen to understand. They listen to reply. The collective monologue is everyone talking and no one listening.

The Torah is the foundational text for Jewish law, but the Haggadah is our book of living memory. We are not merely telling a story here. We are being called to a radical act of empathy. Here we are, embarking on an ancient, perennial attempt to give human lives - our lives - dignity.

Empathy is not simply a matter of trying to imagine what others are going through, but having the will to muster enough courage to do something about it. In a way, empathy is predicated upon hope.