Sensitivity to Others Quotes

No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity. But I know none, and therefore am no beast.

Character is revealed in the power to discern the suffering of other people when we ourselves are suffering; in the ability to detect the hunger of others when we are hungry; and in the power to reach out and extend compassion for the spiritual agony of others when we are in the midst of our own spiritual distress.

Compassion is not a passion; rather a noble disposition of the soul, made ready to receive love, mercy, and other charitable passions.

We feel and weigh soon enough what we suffer from others: but how much others suffer from us, of this we take no heed.

It’s just what they are — they’re jokes…most jokes are about Jewish people, rednecks, black folks…I can’t determine what offends another person.

Empathic listening is so powerful because it gives you accurate data to work with. Instead of projecting your own autobiography and assuming thoughts, feelings, motives and interpretation, you're dealing with the reality inside another person's head and heart. You're listening to understand. You're focused on receiving the deep communication of another human soul.

As disciples of Christ, we need to feel genuine charity for one another. As we do, new light will come into our own lives. This charity is essential in missionary work, but we must never allow ourselves to treat our neighbors only as potential converts. We have had the sad experience of seeing members of the Church who attempted to convert their neighbors and friends and, when they did not respond, withdrew their friendship and neighborliness. We must not be so anxious to share the gospel that we become insensitive to the feelings of others.

I never wanted to grow a thicker skin; I felt a real sense of pride in my thin skin, and in a weird way, I still do, because it's my thin skin that allows me to empathize with other people. It's the thing that allows me to create vulnerable art. It's the thing that allows me to create other feelings and make songs that actually grab people and touch people. I feel like I've spent my life fighting that thicker skin because I don't want to become an embittered asshole.

Tact is the unsaid part of what you think.

It's the hardest thing in the world to go on being aware of someone else's pain.

If we only knew how many times our seemingly clever comment cut straight into the heart of the person with whom we have just spoken, it is we who would bleed.

Nothing precludes sympathy so much as a perfect indifference to it

To listen acutely is to be powerless, even if you sit on a throne.

Many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know. I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. The wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

He who feels contempt for any living thing hath faculties that he hath never used, and thought with him is in its infancy.

Much of the insensibility and hardness of the world is due to the lack of imagination which prevents a realization of the experiences of other people.

It's really important to be attentive to the people who have less - who are less fortunate than you are.

It's important to be aware of how we treat others. Even though someone appears to shrug off a sideways comment or to not be affected by a rumor, it's impossible to know everything else going on in that person's life, how we might be adding to his/her pain. People do have an impact on the lives of others; that's undeniable.

Raising children has given me a compassionate and gracious heart for all children and people, realizing we don't always know the circumstances behind closed doors.

Peace of heart that is won by refusing to bear the common yoke of human sympathy is a peace unworthy of a Christian. To seek tranquility by stopping our ears to the cries of human pain is to make ourselves not Christian but a kind of degenerate stoic having no relation either to stoicism or Christianity.

No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.

I am dealing with people and not with things. And, because I am dealing with people, I cannot refuse my wholehearted and loving attention, even in personal matters, where I see that a student is in need of such attention.

I would like to explain the meaning of compassion, which is often misunderstood. Genuine compassion is based not on our own projections and expectations, but rather on the rights of the other: irrespective of whether another person is a close friend

To see with the eyes of another, to hear with the ears of another, to feel with the heart of another. For the time being, this seems to me an admissible definition of what we call social feeling.

As you get older, as you become more sensitive, feel more, it becomes harder to make jokes. You censor yourself.