empathizing with others Quotes

Not being untutored in suffering, I learn to pity those in affliction

I remember Anthony Perkins saying, "Real is not necessarily interesting." So real is not enough. But what happens as an actor is that you're really trained to listen and to be open and have empathy. It's such a natural consequence that you end up being more political. You can empathize with the mother whose kids are going to be sent to Iraq, or you can emphasize with the mother who is losing their child to a disease. How could you not then be active? So you're automatically drawn to that aspect in the rest of your life.

There are some of us who think to ourselves, 'If I had only been there! How quick I would have been to help the Baby. I would have washed His linen. How happy I would have been to go with the shepherds to see the Lord lying in the manger!' Why don't we do it now? We have Christ in our neighbor.

When we offer succor to anyone, the Savior feels it as if we reached out to succor Him.

Only one human being recognized as one's neighbour is necessary in order to cure a man of self-love

If anybody could put themselves in that situation of feeling a giant loud voice saying you don't deserve the same rights, you are different and you are not equal, it feels really bad.

But how little we know what would make paradise for our neighbours! We judge from our own desires, and our neighbours themselves are not always open enough even to throw out a hint of theirs.

I saw a girl complaining that the pain of not being seen was unbearable... Now I have perfect understanding. I have already experienced the worst. After this, there is no worse possible thing.

If you want to live your whole life free from pain you must become either a god or else a corpse. Consider other men's troubles and that will comfort you.

It's very humbling to imagine somebody else's really life and their pain ... It's my drug.

I don't really care if people like a character ornot; I think in life we don't always like everybody. But you haveto be able to understand them.

I've personally been on the outside sometimes. But I was - I personally was never persecuted especially in the way in which sharing my own experiences.

You've got to just let it go and know that other people are enjoying the fact that you've fallen over. It makes you feel better about the next time you laugh when you see another person fall over. These things go in cycles; someone has to fall over at some point, even the coolest man on earth. Ryan Gosling has fallen over...once. He has! It's just a fact, Ryan Gosling has fallen over and we should all embrace that.

To be fair to Monica," I said, "what you did to her wasn't very nice either." "What'd I do to her?" he asked, defensive. "You know, going blind and everything." "But that's not my fault," Isaac said. "I'm not saying it was your fault. I'm saying it wasn't nice.

I'm sorry for losing my temper following the race, but after a day or two of looking back at the race it's easy to realize that it's just not that big of a deal compared with what the people of the Gulf Coast are still going through.

Even if a tamed wolf makes a good sheepdog, he will never understand how the sheep feel....You are most fortunate. For having been, as you thought, a coward, and helpless to fight - you know what that is like. You know what bitterness that feeling breeds - you know in your own heart what kind of evil it brings. And so you are most fit to fight it where it occurs.

Do not to be as shy around girls, because they're probably just as shy and just as scared as you are.

Feeling sympathy and searching for explanations isn't the same as believing that the violence is justified.

It’s no longer about the Lost Boys. They keep trying to make their way out, then they meet other people and empathize with them. It’s a story that a lot of people are going to discover their purpose from. When someone doesn’t know their purpose, they get lost.

How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another's heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known? Even if the world's rich and powerful were to put themselves in the shoes of the rest, how much would they really understand the wretched millions suffering around them? So it is when Orhan the novelist peers into the dark corners of his poet friend's difficult and painful life: How much can he really see?

Learning what it is to be among other human beings includes learning that they can be different from us as well as similar. We imagine what it would be like to experience the world differently from their locations, nor our own. We might still use analogies to understand others, but analogies point to similarities that co-exist with differences. Similar in some respects is consistent with different in other respects.

When we understand the other fellow's viewpoint - understand what he is trying to do - nine times out of ten he is trying to do right.

The degree of sympathy we feel regarding another's fiasco is directly proportional to how easy or difficult it is for us to imagine ourselves, under like circumstances, making a similar mistake.

When bad things happened to other people, I imagined them happening to me. I didn’t know if this was empathy or theft.

When I talk about an "empathy bank," I don't mean literally opening up a bank and putting in deposits. What I mean is that the more we can, as individuals and as members of a community, empathize with, understand the pain and uncertainty economic crisis causes other people, the more we lay the groundwork for political change.