When people are really suffering, and we know they're suffering, that question can be a very difficult one. Inadvertently, I think without anyone meaning it, it communicates a lack of empathy.
There are actors who just bring an enormous amount of empathy. They just have that"it" that makes you want to follow them and root for them.
Torture presupposes, it requires, it craves the abrogation of our capacity to imagine others suffering, dehumanizing them so much that their pain is not our pain. It demands this of the torturer, placing the victim outside and beyond any form of compassion or empathy, but also demands of everyone else the same distancing, the same numbness.
It's the hardest thing in the world to go on being aware of someone else's pain.
The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque.
Listen that you may live.
When your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival.
I realized I had written maybe, I dunno, the first ever asexual love song. Where it's really just about a fear of dying alone - you need contact, you need love, you need empathy. You need this relationship but if there's no sex involved, people act like it's not a legitimate relationship.
What he has in addition is pure empathy and projection,” Dr. Bloom said. “He can assume your point of view, or mine – and maybe some other points of view that scare and sicken him. It’s an uncomfortable gift, Jack. Perception’s a tool that’s pointed on both ends.
Compassion and empathy are not the same as feeling sorry for oneself. They are emotions that extend our perceptual ranges.
So, as you can readily see from what I have said thus far, a creative, active, sensitive, accurate, empathic, nonjudgmental listening is for me terribly important in a relationship. It is important for me to provide it; it has been extremely important, especially at certain times in my life, to receive it. I feel that I have grown within myself when I have provided it; I am very sure that I have grown and been released and enhanced when I have received this kind of listening.
Empathy and social skills are social intelligence, the interpersonal part of emotional intelligence. That's why they look alike.
My own sense of well-being and purpose in the world. That comes from studying the world feelingly, with empathy in my work. It comes from staying alert and alive and involved in the lives of the people that I love and the people in the wider world who need my help.
Playwriting is all about empathy, getting inside the head of someone who is not you, to think like they think without judging them.
The heart of an Irishman is nothing but his imagination
The most important thing is that we need to be understood. We need someone to be able to listen to us and to understand us. Then we will suffer less.
Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals.
You have to have sympathy for and an empathy with a character in order to play them.
Jealousy knows neither morality nor empathy.
You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself.