empathy

Empathy begins with understanding life from another person's perspective. Nobody has an objective experience of reality. It's all through our own individual prisms.

When you start to develop your powers of empathy and imagination, the whole world opens up to you.

This is a wonderful planet, and it is being completely destroyed by people who have too much money and power and no empathy.

The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy.

The second you think that all your good fortune is a product of your virtue, you become highly judgmental, lacking empathy, totally without self-awareness, arrogant, stupid - I mean, all the stuff that our ruling class is.

Humans aren't as good as we should be in our capacity to empathize with feelings and thoughts of others, be they humans or other animals on Earth. So maybe part of our formal education should be training in empathy. Imagine how different the world would be if, in fact, that were 'reading, writing, arithmetic, empathy.'

I call him religious who understands the suffering of others.

You can't write about the past and ignore religion. It was such a fundamental, mind-shaping, driving force for pre-modern societies. I'm very interested in what religion does to us - its capacity to create love and empathy or hatred and violence.

No human heart is denied empathy. No religion can demolish that by indoctrination. No culture, no nation and nationalism - nothing can touch it because it is empathy.

I always feel that life can teach you how to act. I'm always looking at life through other people's eyes. By feeling empathy. And I do feel that I am constantly learning.

Learning is a result of listening, which in turn leads to even better listening and attentiveness to the other person. In other words, to learn from the child, we must have empathy, and empathy grows as we learn.

We've sweated and torn out our hair trying to reconstruct our chosen lives, to fashion them like literary sculptures, at once monumental and yet human. We've applied all of our intelligence, our empathy, our critical faculties, our compassion - and we think, in our delusion, that it's still 1960, and our work is going to get noticed.

I think the very idea of character, of developing not just grit, but empathy and curiosity, emotional intelligence - you know, the things that I want my own daughters to develop - the idea that we're going to get there through rewards and punishments seems completely at odds with the idea of character itself.

Having emotional intelligence allows you to manage your emotions, show empathy, and prevent you from getting distracted. It also helps you solve problems and be a more likable person.

We admire elephants in part because they demonstrate what we consider the finest human traits: empathy, self-awareness, and social intelligence. But the way we treat them puts on display the very worst of human behavior.

Artificial intelligence is growing up fast, as are robots whose facial expressions can elicit empathy and make your mirror neurons quiver.

Empathy and social skills are social intelligence, the interpersonal part of emotional intelligence. That's why they look alike.

If you list the qualities that we consider feminine, they are patience, understanding, empathy, supportiveness, a desire to nurture. Our culture tells us those are feminine traits, but they're really just human.