Frans de Waal Quotes

Pity is not natural to man. Children always are cruel. Savages are always cruel.

The sympathy of most people consists of a mixture of good-humour, curiosity, and self-importance.

I've always read in order to figure out people more, and that includes bad people and good people.

I find human behavior really interesting. I think that's ultimately what being an actor is. You explore what it means to be human.

I was fifteen years old when I understood how it is that things break down: people can't imagine someone else's point of view.

I think that if we don't learn to inhabit other people's perspectives, then we're never going to understand why people do what they do.

Changing your attitude from self-centerdness to understanding requires desire and commitment to always try to see things from the other persons point of view.

No one needs to teach you to be mean; we need to be taught to be kind.

Reading will put you into the minds and hearts of others. It might help you understand why other people do what they do sometimes.

I can't remember the last book that taught me so much, and so well, about what it means to be human.

To think justly, we must understand what others mean. To know the value of our thoughts, we must try their effect on other minds.

We can't love our neighbors till we know how crooked their hearts are.

We now know, from the latest research about neurons, that we are hard-wired for empathy. We're hard-wired for cooperation. That is something about what we are as people - what it means to be a human being. And what Barack Obama was addressing was not just race or just the nature of politics. The great speeches address who we are as people, what it means to be a human being.

Caring for others is an expression of what it means to be fully human.

For the most part, people use "empathy" to mean everything good. For instance, many medical schools have courses in empathy. But if you look at what they mean, they just want medical students to be nicer to their patients, to listen to them, to respect them, to understand them. What's not to like? If they were really teaching empathy, then I'd say there is a world of problems there.

Much of the insensibility and hardness of the world is due to the lack of imagination which prevents a realization of the experiences of other people.

But let us not forget that human love and compassion are equally deeply rooted in our primate heritage, and in this sphere too our sensibilities are of a higher order of magnitude than those of chimpanzees.

I am ever fascinated by the human experience and by, actually, human beings.

It's one of the ironies of human nature that the most sensitive people are generally insensitive to the feelings of others.

Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings.

Readers no longer need novelists to tell us what it's like to cross the world on a ship or fight a war. In the twenty-first century, we get that information in other ways. The thing that's still a mystery to us is the human heart. What we want is to understand people, what they're doing, and why they're doing it.

I deal in emotions. It's the harmonic side that's important. That's the side I expected to be much further along on than I am now. That just means to say that I've got to keep at it.

Pity is not natural to man. Children are always cruel. Savages are always cruel. Pity is acquired and improved by the cultivation of reason. We may have uneasy sensations from seeing a creature in distress, without pity; for we have not pity unless we wish to relieve them.

We do not increase compassion by expanding it to cover anything. Instead, we kill a good word by making it mean too much, and nothing.

I hate the very human inclination towards insensitivity