Leslie Jamison Quotes

The ability to understand the cause of your own suffering gives you the ability to understand ours.

People in distress never think that you feel enough.

When you are suffering, you become more understanding about yourself, but also about other people's sufferings too. That's the first step to understand somebody is to understand their sufferings. So then love follows.

A prerequisite to empathy is simply paying attention to the person in pain.

Empathy is the faculty to resonate with the feelings of others. When we meet someone who is joyful, we smile. When we witness someone in pain, we suffer in resonance with his or her suffering.

Anyone who has experienced a certain amount of loss in their life has empathy for those who have experienced loss.

There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.

It's easy when you have suffered to feel the link with what others have gone through.

Love is to understand, at last, the suffering of another.

It is human nature to imagine, to put yourself in another's shoes. The past may be another country. But the only passport required is empathy.

Empathy during agony is a portion of divinity.

It is people who go through suffering that have an empathy for the suffering of others.

Don't judge someone's attitude until you've felt their pain.

True kindness presupposes the faculty of imagining as one's own the suffering and joys of others.

Anyone who has gone through great suffering is bound to have a greater sympathy and understanding of the problems of mankind.

In your heart must well that sympathy which soothes away all pains from the hearts of others.

One truly must have suffered oneself to help others.

That this is the source of our fellow-feeling for the misery of others, that it is by changing places in fancy with the sufferer, that we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels, may be demonstrated by many obvious observations, if it should not be thought sufficiently evident of itself. When we see a stroke aimed and just ready to fall upon the leg or arm of another person, we naturally shrink and draw back our own leg or our own arm; and when it does fall, we feel it in some measure, and are hurt by it as well as the sufferer.

If the people who hurt us have anger or desperation within them then they suffer. When you see that someone suffers, you might be motivated by a desire to help him not to suffer anymore.

Because Jesus Christ suffered greatly, He understands our suffering. He understands our grief. We experience hard things so that we too may have increased compassion and understanding for others.

True sympathy is putting ourselves in another's place; and we are moved in proportion to the reality of our imagination.

Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else's shoes for a while.

You don't want to diminish anybody's pain and suffering.

Imaginative empathy is one of the great gifts that humans have, and it means that we can live more than one life. We can picture what it would be like from another perspective.

Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation. This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do - it can make us identify with situations and people far away.