Gloria Steinem Quotes

All those chemicals that create empathy only work when you are in a room together.

Indeed, though people increasingly learn and interact online, we retain a fundamental need to engage in person.

People are always going to need physicality; they're going to want to meet other people even more. I've got faith in the physical angle. People have their needs. They won't forget about them.

Connecting with people in person is so important. To look in the eyes of our girls and let them know that you really do support them transcends the impersonal connection of technology.

I force people to have coffee with me, just because I don't trust that a friendship can be maintained without any other senses besides a computer or cellphone screen.

Basic emotions can be conveyed through anything. As long as you show people that you're human, they'll relate to it.

But you can't realize, you can't know what another person goes through.

The power of being in the physical presence of another person delivers real benefits.

One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.

I don't care how advanced technology gets. I don't think that there's anything that can replace looking someone in the eyes, touching their hand, you know?

I wanted to get people to feel where I'm coming from and connect with people who are feeling the same way that I am.

Empathy is about two people - two people meeting, getting to know each other and tuning in to what the other person is thinking and feeling.

To be truly empathetic, we have to acknowledge that we're all human, we're all flawed, and that life can be difficult.

She looked down again and I was stymied. I sat. Oh, this was enough to make me love her, because I was right with her, understanding every second and longing to step in. I didn’t even need to know the specific that was troubling her, because to me her halting voice easily stood for the general woe that hangs in the air, even on life’s happiest days.

It turns out that we literally don't empathize unless we're physically present - that the oxytocin, the famous "tend and befriend" hormone is not produced unless we're present with all five senses.

We need empathy, we need the eyes that still can weep.

All my life I've been interested in other people's stories. I wanted to know them, understand them, feel them.

Each one of us has lived through some devastation, some loneliness, some weather superstorm or spiritual superstorm, when we look at each other we must say, I understand. I understand how you feel because I have been there myself. We must support each other and empathize with each other because each of us is more alike than we are unalike.

To connect to people at the deepest level, you need stories.

He didn't know of course. Not really. And yet that was what he said, and I was soothed to hear it. For I knew what he meant. We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delineaments, weight, and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all. "I know," he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.

That's why I liked him, I think. Another guy pretending to be human, just like me.

We're all strangers connected by what we reveal, what we share, what we take away--our stories. I guess that's what I love about books--they are thin strands of humanity that tether us to one another for a small bit of time, that make us feel less alone or even more comfortable with our aloneness, if need be.

If you're a person and care about other people - I don't think I have any sort of special understanding or anything, I think any feeling person would experience similar things if given the same opportunities to see the things I've been lucky enough to see and meet the people I've been lucky enough to meet.

We need other human beings in order to be human.

The important thing is being capable of emotions, but to experience only one's own would be a sorry limitation.