"People don't listen to understand. They listen to reply. The collective monologue is everyone talking and no one listening."
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Empathy quotes
Empathy
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Empathy quotes (page 5 of 34)
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"When you listen with empathy to another person, you give that person psychological air."
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"Hence it demands the emptiness of all the faculties. And when the faculties are empty, then the whole being listens. There is then a direct grasp of what is right there before you that can never be heard with the ear or understood with the mind."
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"I've always felt you don't have to be completely detached, emotionally uninvolved to make precise observations. There's nothing wrong with feeling great empathy for your subjects."
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"Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let’s use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy and remind ourselves of all the ways that our hopes and dreams are bound together."
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"The world doesn't just revolve around you. There's a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit. But I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit."
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"When you see around you the human form suffering or dissolving, you have empathy on the human level. You share the suffering because it has to do with the fleetingness of form. But if that is the only level that operates in you, you haven't gone beyond suffering."
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"Real social progress is always a widening of the circle of concern and protection. It's respect and empathy overtaking blindness and indifference. It's understanding that by the true measure, we are all neighbors and countrymen, call to each one of us to know what is right and kind and just and to go and do likewise."
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"Writing is an act of empathy. You are occupying and understanding a point of view that might be alien to your own--and work is often the keyhole through which you peer."
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"Filmmaking is challenging for men and women. In both cases, it is incredibly difficult. And gender is neither a guarantee of greater sensitivity, capacity for empathy or aperture."
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"If you have this deep feeling of empathy for the natural world, you feel it so profoundly. It's almost a religious experience. I feel that I could never really say the depth of feeling or connection I feel to the natural world, which has made me."
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"Did you ever notice how difficult it is to argue with someone who is not obsessed with being right?"
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"I have been under considerable pressure to buy at least a laptop computer. I have always turned the suggestions down for the reason that I have never done creative work on a typewriter. There is to me a lack of empathy."
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"The hearing that is only in the ears is one thing. The hearing of the understanding is another. But the hearing of the spirit is not limited to any one faculty to the ear, or to the mind."
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"I thought, "Why? and how did we evolve with this weak, and useless passion in tact within the deep heart's core?" And the answer as I've formulated it to myself is that empathy is the engine that powers all the best in us."
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"Our easiest approach to a definition of any aspect of fiction is always by considering the sort of demand it makes on the reader. Curiosity for the story, human feelings and a sense of value for the characters, intelligence and memory for the plot. What does fantasy ask of us? It asks us to pay something extra."
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"I hope you don’t listen to this. I hope you choose to broaden, and not contract, your ambit of concern."
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"Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people."
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"Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger."
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"A sketch of a man facing to the right."
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