#empathy

What Mr. Obama wants in a nominee isn't really "empathy" and "understanding." He wants a liberal, activist Supreme Court justice. ↗

— Karl Rove

#court #empathy #justice #liberal #mr

When a mother quarrels with a daughter, she has a double dose of unhappiness hers from the conflict, and empathy with her daughter's from the conflict with her. Throughout her life a mother retains this special need to maintain a good relationship with her daughter. ↗

— Terri Apter

#daughter #dose #double #empathy #good

All human beings have their otherness and it is that which cries out to the heart. ↗

— Elizabeth Goudge

#love #uniqueness #love

Indeed, insight is the true hallmark of empathy. The power of true empathy is its ability to give us a fresh understanding of the other person's emotions and thoughts to illuminate an aspect of their experience that would not have been apparent to us had we not stepped into their shoes. ↗

— Guy Winch

#experience

The misery of other people is only an abstraction [...] something that can be sympathized with only by drawing from one's own experiences. But as it stands, true empathy remains impossible. And so long as it is, people will continue to suffer the pressure of their seemingly singular existence. ↗

— Nicole Krauss

#experiences #loneliness #misery #experience

Misery comes to miser; joy comes to wiser. (A Very Hot Cup of Tea, Empathy) Juvenile invites, youth tries, adult applies, and the old man dies. (A Straw Man, Empathy) In everyone, there lives a superhero. (The Medicine Man, Empathy) Faith is the strongest word in any dictionary. (The Wisdom Beard, Empathy) I’ve entered into your feelings; it’s your turn now. (Empathy) ↗

— D.R. Mirror

#death-and-dying #empathy #fiction #short-story #death

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. ↗

— Carson McCullers

#empathy #friendship #knowing #knowledge #meeting

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, ... [but] surely one didn't need to have suffered in order to possess empathy for those who had? All it required was a bit of imagination and a well-stocked library. ↗

— Michelle Cooper

#empathy #reading #suffering #imagination

If literature does one thing, it makes you more empathetic by making you live other lives and feel the pain of others. Ideologues don't feel the pain of others because they haven't imaginatively got under their skins. ↗

— Yann Martel

#empathy #imagination

If you have the power to hit people over the head whenever you want, you don’t have to trouble yourself too much figuring out what they think is going on, and therefore, generally speaking, you don’t. Hence the sure-fire way to simplify social arrangements, to ignore the incredibly complex play of perspectives, passions, insights, desires, and mutual understandings that human life is really made of, is to make a rule and threaten to attack anyone who breaks it. This is why violence has always been the favored recourse of the stupid: it is the one form of stupidity to which it is almost impossible to come up with an intelligent response. It is also of course the basis of the state. ↗

— David Graeber

#government #intelligence #stupidity #violence #intelligence