But the moods could be contagious. He didn’t need one right now.

Only by examining our personal biases can we truly grow as artists; only by cultivating empathy can we truly grow as people.

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...

One must always forgive another’s passion.

Empathy needs no genius.

Children arrive animists. They learn about life, themselves, and empathy by imagining the liveliness of everything they come into contact with.

I think I’m an actor because I have very strong imagination and empathy. I never studied acting, but those two qualities are exactly the qualities that make for an activist.

One of his greatest talents was empathy; no sadist can aspire to perfection without that diagnostic ability.

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.

Humans are unique in having the astonishing capacity to extend our sympathies far beyond the here and now. through time and space, to anywhere and anything we choose. It is our culture that decides how...

Such lonely, lost things you find on your way. It would be easier, if you were the only one lost. But lost children always find each other, in the dark, in the cold. It is...

Our treatment of animals, in every department, is deeply and systematically immoral. Becoming a vegetarian is only the most minimal ethical response to the magnitude of the evil.

If you truly have compassion in your heart, show it by keeping your doubts to yourself and sharing your hope with those who love change!

The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity,...

Positivity can be a negative,” I tell her, “if it’s used to diminish events that should be cause for concern. Saying ‘bad things happen to good people’ or “God doesn’t give anyone more than they...

The only time you look in your neighbor’s bowl is to make sure that they have enough. You don’t look in your neighbor’s bowl to see if you have as much as them.

Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds.

They feel taken advantage of by the city. I have some empathy for that.

Why must you know the details of my troubles to have compassion? Is it not enough to show compassion simply because you know that everyone has troubles?

To embrace suffering culminates in greater empathy, the capacity to feel what it is like for the other to suffer, which is the ground for unsentimental compassion and love. (157)

Empathy, evidently, existed only within the human community, whereas intelligence to some degree could be found throughout every phylum and order including the arachnida. For one thing, the empathic faculty probably required an unimpaired group...

A writer is like a tuning fork: We respond when we’re struck by something. The thing is to pay attention, to be ready for radical empathy. If we empty ourselves of ourselves we’ll be able...

There’s something in everyone only they know.

I wanted simultaneously to understand Hanna’s crime and to condemn it. But it was too terrible for that. When I tried to understand it, I had the feeling I was failing to condemn it as...

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.

Those who really can receive bread from a stranger and smile in gratitude, can feed many without even realizing it. Those who can sit in silence with their fellow man not knowing what to say...

The main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one’s narcissism. The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in...

Fiction challenges us and works its miracles by placing us in the skin of another human being and teaching us empathy.

By revealing to Tomas her dream about jabbing needles under her fingernails, Tereza unwittingly revealed that she had gone through his desk. If Tereza had been any other woman, Tomas would never have spoken to...

To be good, is to be like God. Our purpose in life is to try and reach that standard. We will always fall short, but in our lifetime if we try our best to make...

As we tell stories about the lives of others, we learn how to imagine what another creature might feel in response to various events. At the same time, we identify with the other creature and...

To be exploited fundamentally means to be confused. When you’re not confused you can’t be exploited because you have clarity about the situation. To confuse people you must provide contradictory information. People who really want...

[The answer of Solon to the question ‘Which is the most perfect popular government?’]That where the least injury done to the meanest individual, is considered as an insult on the whole constitution.

This is where the will to grapple with our hard and pressing environmental problems begins: in relationship to something other that you love beyond any utility, beyond any logic.

In pursuit of exposing people for who we think they are, we expose ourself.

My other boy thing is that I sort of have a teeny tiny superpower. It’s not a jump-over-buildings, see-through-people’s-clothes, or lift-a-train-over-my-head one, which is good, because when you can do those kinds of things you...

To perceive is to suffer.

People said things to me like “They’re just animals. They’re here for our use.” I had a visceral reaction to that phrase, maybe because I was told countless times during my growing-up years that I...

Treat people like people. Beware of pity and patronization because in them, you can’t see when you’re unashamedly looking down on someone.

I had a dream about you. You were guarding a bridge that I needed to cross. You asked if I had the proper paperwork, and I said I did, but I was just missing one...

The emotional states are liberated inside water, we calm down emotionally, we become more sensitive, we are able to “touch” deeper ourselves and other beings. Empathy is echoing back to us giving subtle vibrations from...

We weep for the blood of a bird, but not for the blood of a fish. Blessed are those who have voice.

Pain without cause is a pain we can’t trust. We assume it’s been chosen or fabricated.

…Because a book is a little empathy machine. It puts you inside somebody else’s head. You see out of the world through somebody else’s eyes. It’s very hard to hate people of a certain kind...

I stumble and fall.I weep and struggle to rise.My mom feels it all.

Do you know what it is?’ [Toby] said thoughtfully. ‘It’s that they haven’t had anything really awful happen to them. No wonder they seem so superficial and unfeeling.’ It was certainly an interesting theory, …...

King and Gandhi had found a way to use aggressive impulses to resist injustice without hurting others. Where did the aggression go? The answer, as King would later tell Poussaint, was this: into the courage...

In my judgment, the woman is the equal of the man. She has all the rights I have and one more, and that is the right to be protected. That is my doctrine. You are...

Empathy is the stepping stone to respect

When a good man is hurt all who would be called good must suffer with him.