Only by examining our personal biases can we truly grow as artists; only by cultivating empathy can we truly grow as people.
All I ever wanted was to reach out and touch another human being not just with my hands but with my heart.
It is an absolute human certainty that no one can know his own beauty or perceive a sense of his own worth until it has been reflected back to him in the mirror of another loving, caring human being.
There are so many men, all endlessly attempting to sweep me off my feet. And there is one of you, trying just the opposite. Making sure my feet are firm beneath me, lest I fall.
It’s not so much the journey that’s important; as is the way that we treat those we encounter and those around us, along the way
Writing fiction is one of the greatest forms of empathy. It's not enough to simply write from the perspective of your characters...you have to feel what they feel.
The next time you wish you could find the right words to say to someone who is hurting, just remember that dogs are a man's best friend without ever speaking a word to them. Simply be present and have sympathy.
I had a dream that I was in someone else’s shoes for once…they were the wrong size.
Is it foolish to care for non-existent folk?
Then, leave me to my foolishness.
The novelist defines the story with the following example: If you are told that the king died and then the queen died, that is a sequence of events. If you were told that the king died and then the queen died of grief, that is a story that he was interested.
None of us can choose where we shall love...
If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in.
To perceive is to suffer.
Sooner or later in life, we will all take our own turn being in the position we once had someone else in.
No one cares how much you know, until they know how much you care
A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see
Each person you meet
is an aspect of yourself,
clamoring for love.
Among all the creatures of creation, the gods favor us: We are the only ones who can empathize with their problems.
I stumble and fall.
I weep and struggle to rise.
My mom feels it all.
For you see, when us people who know run into each other that's an event. It almost never happens. Sometimes we meet each other and neither guesses that the other is one who knows. That's a bad thing. It's happened to me a lot of times. But you see there are so few of us.
Education leads to enlightenment. Enlightenment opens the way to empathy. Empathy foreshadows reform.
I call him religious who understands the suffering of others.
When in Reading Gaol he told me that the warders in the dock had been gentle and kind, but the visit of the chaplain in his first prison began with these words:
'Mr. Wilde, did you have morning prayers in your house?'
'I am sorry... I fear not.'
'You see where you are now!
Our stories hold unique inspiration for one another.
Everyone breathing is broken. Keep breathing light into them until the stained glass collage takes your breath away.
Anguish is the universal language
Humanity is not without answers or solutions regarding how to liberate itself from scenarios that invariably end with mass exterminations. Tools such as compassion, trust, empathy, love, and ethical discernment are already in our possession. The next sensible step would be to use them.
There is no key to open the heart of another - except curiosity.
By acquiescing in an act that causes such suffering to a living creature, who among us is not diminished?
Social intelligence was therefore always at a high premium. A sharp sense of empathy can make a huge difference, and with it in an ability to manipulate, to gain cooperation, and to deceive.
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
Any empathic person who knows how valuable time is will think twice before wasting another person's time, because losing time is losing a part of your life.
Most of us tend to belittle all suffering except our own," said Mary. "I think it's fear. We don't want to come too near in case we're sucked in and have to share it.
When I get ready to talk to people, I spend two thirds of the time thinking what they want to hear and one third thinking about what I want to say.
One of the benefits of aligning yourself with an indistinct cluster of people is that claiming to feel their pain is often enough.
I want a future abortion conversation known for its openness, respect and empathy, so instead of generating more heat, anger and conflict, I practice pro-voice.
The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny.
How does one develop compassion for someone with a completely different set of values without reading something from their point of view? Books are one of the ways in which we can truly get into the heads of people we would never meet in our ordinary lives and travel to countries we would otherwise never visit.
Sometimes when you're surrounded by dirt, CJ, you're a better witness for what's beautiful.
Love is not all about loving everything perfect, it is when someones corrosive nature is the only thing that glues you to them which you wished it were never there.
Without empathy, there'd be no harmony in diversity
...to make art is to realize another's sadness within, realize the hidden sadness in other people's lives, to feel sad with and for a stranger.
[...] art instills the fundamental moral lesson: That you aren't the center of the universe. That others weren't created for your benefit. That they are just as real as you, with equal claimes to dignity and understanding.
When we fail to harmonize and integrate, living systems, from individuals to families and countries, tend to move toward either chaos or rigidity.
History is not just facts and events. History is also a pain in the heart and we repeat history until we are able to make another's pain in the heart our own.
It's the hardest thing in the world to go on being aware of someone else's pain.
Ironically, torture requires empathy, too, in the sense that one cannot deliberately inflict pain without realizing what is painful.
You don't have to go through someone's pain to understand it. Empathy is enough.
The way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people's pain.
Empathy? What’s that?” Glokta winced as he rubbed at his aching leg. “It’s a sad fact, but pain only makes you sorry for yourself.
Imagining someone else's pain with too much surety can be as damaging as failing to imagine it.
Pain without cause is a pain we can't trust. We assume it's been chosen or fabricated.
Sometimes all you can do is hug a friend tightly and wish that their pain could be transferred by touch to your own emotional hard drive.
The nature of humanity, its essence, is to feel another's pain as one's own, and to act to take that pain away,. There is a nobility in compassion, a beauty in empathy, a grace in forgiveness.
Empathy comes from the Greek empatheia - em (into) and pathos (feeling) - a penetration, a kind of travel. It suggests you enter another person's pain as you'd enter another country, through immigration and customs, border crossing by way of query: What grows where you are? What are the laws? What animals graze there?
People rarely ventured outside the realm of their own hurts. They believed their own suffering was obvious to all, but might as well have been wearing blinders for all that they noticed anyone else's.
When we see others cry it is difficult, not because of feeling their pain, but your own.
Some people have a thick skin and you don't. Your heart is really open and that is going to cause pain, but that is an appropriate response to this world.
God only knows the torment of the suffering soul and only he can take away the pain.
Other people's sorrows and joys have a way of reminding us of our own; we partly emphasize with them because we ask ourselves: What about me? What does this say about my life, my pains, my anguish?
The pain on the inside is what keeps you human,' she said. 'Never forget that.
But when he’s cut, I bleed.
I always wondered what it must be like to lose a twin - if somehow Mary felt it like it was happening to her. If she felt physical pain.
The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy, we can all sense a mysterious connection to each other.
There's something in everyone only they know.
All that we can't say is all we need to hear.
How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.
Nothing renews my faith in humanity more than the exchange of compassion so profound that mere words cannot embrace it.
I came to recognise that, apart from her [Françoise's] own kinsfolk, the sufferings of humanity inspired in her a pity which increased in direct ratio to the distance separating the sufferers from herself.
Shared emotions experienced by two souls,empathy on unequivocal level which Davey believed would change entire species of mankind if only secret of empathy could be telepathically shared with humanity,one soul after another, until every soul understood true meaning of love.
Neither did she realise yet that grief is a kind of glue, too, that the essence of humanity is this empathy, and that we fall together in that moment of tenderest perception when we see and feel each other's wounds and know another's sorrow like a brother of our own.
Help someone, you earn a friend. Help someone too much, you make an enemy.
They say compassion is the only voice; a gift which can help mend the broken, lift the fallen and soften the hardened.
I’m pretty sure all the individuals trying to control other people’s happiness have none in their own lives.
Understanding people’s difficulties and - just as crucial - helping people understand their own difficulties and teaching them concrete ways to help themselves will help them better deal with their own lives and, in turn, ours.
Because of the value placed on individual materialistic success in our society, we are surrounded by people primarily interested in getting something from others. Their attitudes are characterised by selfishness and a lack of empathy for others.
Appreciate youthfulness and empathize with elderly people.
Some people think only intellect counts: knowing how to solve problems, knowing how to get by, knowing how to identify an advantage and seize it. But the functions of intellect are insufficient without courage, love, friendship, compassion, and empathy.
I thought it would teach them a thing or two about empathy, and friendship, and loyalty. As it turns out, Jack Will didn't need to learn any of these virtues- he already had them in abundance.
I'm not asking you to walk in my shoes; I'd never wish my afflictions on anyone. But could you walk beside me on secure ground and reach to hold my hand?
Sympathy’s easy. You have sympathy for starving children swatting at flies on the late-night commercials. Sympathy is easy because it comes from a position of power. Empathy is getting down on your knees and looking someone else in the eye and realizing you could be them, and that all that separates you is luck.
When you see a person acting violently, ask yourself whether he knows how powerful he is. If he knew his power, would he feel the need to assert it?
The heart of an Irishman is nothing but his imagination
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?
Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.
Motivation is my problem: I’m almost too motivated. I lie awake thinking how Kris would dress for the occasion or why Benjamin would be upset in the field or how the hell Brianna will manage to give birth to the baby under all that stress.
Fiction challenges us and works its miracles by placing us in the skin of another human being and teaching us empathy.
The quality you most admire in a man? Courage moral and physical: 'anima' - the ability to think like a woman. Also a sense of the absurd.
The quality you most admire in a woman? Courage moral and physical: “anima” - the ability to visualize the mind and need of a man. Also a sense of the absurd.
Empaths did not come into this world to be victims, we came to be warriors. Be brave. Stay strong. We need all hands on deck.
To me, empathy and compassion are among the bravest of emotions ... and faith, the bravest of convictions.
The news can be poison to your soul, don't let it kill your joy, be compassionate but not consumed. Be empathetic not enraged.
Feeling too much is a hell of a lot better than feeling nothing.
Es gibt zwei Sorten von Männern. Die einen verstehen 'etwas von Frauen', die anderen sind solche, die einfach 'Frauen verstehen'. Ich weiß nicht, welche Sorte mir verdächtiger ist.
Surprisingly, it is often when wandering through the emotional carnage left by the worst of humankind that we find the best of humanity ad well.
The internet and online communication is the window into your world - but real life, in person communication / connection is the door.
Parents who discipline their child by discussing the consequences of their actions produce children who have better moral development , compared to children whose parents use authoritarian methods and punishment.
IT IS NOT ABOUT SYMPATHY OR LIKEABILITY, EITHER. EMPATHY IS ABOUT THE TRANSLATION OF FEELING.