Empathy took the edge off, and the truth is, we need our edge. Our edge is trying to speak to us, and we are too, too good at shutting it up.
Competitiveness is just as much a part of our nature as empathy. The ideal, in my view, is a democratic system with a social market economy, because it takes both tendencies into account.
My knowledge of myself is direct, synthetic, from within outwards; my knowledge of other persons is indirect, analytical, from outside inwards. My knowledge of myself starts at the core; that of others at the crust.
I started young but at every turn, listening provided a foundation for my leadership. I can say categorically that all the really excellent leaders I have known were, in my view, excellent listeners.
I draw a lot from Buddhism, which focuses on compassion and kindness, loving kindness, as they call it, but rejects empathy because it's a poor moral guide. And I think there's a lot of evidence suggesting that they're right.
That person is most cultivated who is able to put himself in the place of the greatest number of other persons.
Kindness and gentleness never had a gender, and neither did empathy.
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.
All human beings have their otherness and it is that which cries out to the heart.
When scoring a film, empathy is the key. And it is just as important to use music to express the actors' emotions as it is to move the audience.
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.
Although emotionally delicate and eminently bruisable, teenagers are short on empathy. That comes later in life, if it comes at all.
I have a lot of empathy for women who fit their writing into the crevices of their too-busy lives, as I once did.
A lot of people seem to think that art or photography is about the way things look, or the surface of things. That's not what it's about for me. It's really about relationships and feelings. . . it's really hard for me to do commercial work because people kind of want me to do a Nan Goldin. They don't understand that it's not about a style or a look or a setup. It's about emotional obsession and empathy.
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.
Dialogue is a space where we may see the assumptions which lay beneath the surface of our thoughts, assumptions which drive us, assumptions around which we build organizations, create economies, form nations and religions. These assumptions become habitual, mental habits that drive us, confuse us and prevent our responding intelligently to the challenges we face every day.
The Green Shore is an engrossing novel about political oppression, played out on an intimate family scale. Bakopoulos charts the subtle, gnawing pressures of life under the Greek junta - the steady drip of daily coercion - with an exacting empathy. In particular, her depiction of love under tyranny - by turns hesitant, furtive and liberating - is as astute as it is moving.
Every difficulty slurred over will be a ghost to disturb your repose later on.
Empathy is not merely the basic principle of artistic creation. It is also the only path by which one can reach the truth about life and society.
Instead of saying that man is the creature of circumstance, it would be nearer the mark to say that man is the architect of circumstance.