“Empathy requires us to be genuine. It isn’t a tactic, gimmick, or formula to follow. And it requires commitment.”
Source: Brave Souls: Experiencing the Audacious Power of Empathy
“her şeyden önce dedi, basit bir sır öğrenirsen her türlü insanla anlaşman kolaylaşır, Scout. Bir insanı anlayabilmek için o insanın baktığı açıdan bakmayı becerebilmesin...”
Source: To Kill a Mockingbird
“I felt sad for a parakeet the other day. He sings so much. Probably just wants a girlfriend.”
“In all imaginative writing sympathy for the subject is necessary not because it is the politically correct or morally decent posture to adopt but because an absence of sympathy shuts down the mind: engagement fails, the flow of association dries up, and the work narrows. What I mean by sympathy is simply that level of empathic understanding that endows the subject with dimension. The empathy that allows us, the readers, to see the "other" as the other might see him or herself is the empathy that provides movement in the writing.
When someone writes a Mommie Dearest memoir - where the narrator is presented as an innocent and the subject as a monster - the work fails because the situation remains static. For the drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent. Above all, it is the narrator who must complicate in order that the subject be given life.”
Source: The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative
“To find out if she really loved me, I hooked her up to a lie detector. And just as I suspected, my machine was broken.”
Source: Love Quotes for the Ages. Specifically Ages 19-91.
“My friend and business partner, Gerald Peyton was 12 minutes late to the funeral. I’d reminded him it started at 2 p.m. “Yeah, yeah, Frank,” he said. “I’ll be there. Just be sure you make it.” Well, here I sat on my thumbs, and he was the no-show. He stopped at a bar and got sloshed, I thought.”
Source: Death Car
“As a doctor I constantly have to ask myself what kind of message the patient is bringing me. What does he mean to me? If he means nothing, I have no point of attack. The doctor is effective only when he himself is affected. 'Only the wounded physician heals.' But when the doctor wears his personality like a coat of armor, he has no effect.”
Source: Memories, dreams, reflections
“Empathy is what makes people feel safe in relationships. Along with self-awareness, it's the soul of emotional intelligence, guiding people toward prosocial behavior and fairness in dealings with others. In contrast, nonempathic people overlook your feelings and don't seem to imagine your experience or be sensitive to it. It's important to be aware of this, because a person who isn't responsive to your feelings won't be emotionally safe when the two of you have any kind of disagreement.”
Source: Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents
“It takes solidarity and generosity of spirit to build a society in which anyone can feel safe. Empathy can be hard to find, especially for people who look or sound different, or believe different things to us. But when we allow ourselves to be pitted against each other, and to be ruled by the meaner emotions, we dig our own graves alongside those of the people we abandon. It's only when we understand our essential commonality that we can protect ourselves: not as individual humans, but as members of an indivisible whole.”
Source: The Poetry Pharmacy Returns: More Prescriptions for Courage, Healing and Hope
“Trees are great empaths. Trees have this unusual power to take your pain away, if you can establish a connection with them.”
Source: Meditation Walking the Path of Peace: A Guidebook for Stress Free Living