Steve Martin Quotes

Sympathy relies on a common experience. If you're clumsy, you might have sympathy for others who tend to bump into things. Empathy, on the other hand, is the ability to understand another person's feelings even if you've never experienced them yourself.

Sympathy wanting, all is wanting; its personal magnetism is the conductor of the sacred spark that lights our atoms, puts us m human communion, and gives us to company, conversation, and ourselves.

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

When your fear touches someone’s pain, it becomes pity, when your love touches someone’s pain, it become compassion.

Nobody understands another's sorrow, and nobody another's joy.

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.

All I want is for people, when they read my books, to feel companioned, to feel they're not alone in the world.

Above all, I try to create an emotion to which others can respond.

I felt along with her - not the physical pain, of course, but all her mental anguish. You can't be detached. She needed to have someone who understood what was happening in her mind.

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.

It doesn't hurt to show some empathy.

The first word that always came into my head with Henry VI was 'empathy.' He doesn't have a barrier between what other people feel and what he feels.

I definitely, really appreciate that quality that humans like to show constantly, even without saying anything, that they're with you and they're processing something.

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.

When I see people sad, I'm sad.

Someone feeling wronged is like someone feeling thirsty. Don’t tell them they aren’t. Sit with them and have a drink.

Though sympathy alone can't alter facts, it can help to make them more bearable.

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.

Compassion does not only refine and civilize human nature, but has something in it more pleasing and agreeable, than what can be met with in such an indolent happiness, such an indifference to mankind, as that in which the stoics placed their wisdom. As love is the most delightful passion, pity is nothing else but love softened by a degree of sorrow: In short, it is a kind of pleasing anguish, anguish as well as generous sympathy, that knits mankind together, and blends them in the same common lot.

Knowing pain is a very important ingredient of being there for another person.

I think there's just a lot of compassion in art. Again, when you're doing something that resonates with somebody else, you're going through an experience another person has had, whether it's been a painful experience or a joyous experience or a happy experience.

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.

The Little Boy and the Old Man Said the little boy, "Sometimes I drop my spoon." Said the old man, "I do that too." The little boy whispered, "I wet my pants." I do that too," laughed the little old man. Said the little boy, "I often cry." The old man nodded, "So do I." But worst of all," said the boy, "it seems Grown-ups don't pay attention to me." And he felt the warmth of a wrinkled old hand. I know what you mean," said the little old man.