Jay Parini Quotes

Neuroscience has proven that similar areas of the brain are activated both in the person who suffers and in the one who feels empathy. Thus, empathic suffering is a true experience of suffering.

I don't think you have to have experienced things to understand them.

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.

I have a lot of compassion for human beings in life experiences, so I allow myself to feel what these characters are feeling and don't have a problem accepting that.

I would say I'm humanly engaged.

We can empathize as deeply as we can empathize.

When you deal with something like compassion for physical pain, which we know is very, very old in evolution - we can find evidence for it in nonhuman species - the brain processes it at a faster speed. Compassion for mental pain took many seconds longer.

I would like to think that as a result of not just my own experiences, but at least being empathetic and compassionate about other people's experiences and plights and tragedies, that I am affected by it and learn from it.

People need to be more aware of how they're affecting people.

It's got to do with putting yourself in other people's shoes and seeing how far you can come to truly understand them. I like the empathy that comes from acting.

The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy.

Movies that encourage empathy are more effective than those that objectify problems.

We have to teach empathy as we do literacy.

As human beings, what makes us able to empathize with people is a connection that is not necessarily understood mentally.

People aren't very good at other people's pain.

The irony is that I'm actually a very empathetic person, but I don't believe in sympathy at all.

Because I'm highly empathetic, it's easy for me to put myself in the character's shoes. It's, you know, finding the truth of the moment.

I'm fine around other people's feelings. It doesn't make me nervous or anxious.

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 will never actually be able to know what it's like to go through life in someone else's body.

If you operate under the premise that everybody already has some experiences that could be sources of empathy for them, I wonder if there's some process of coaxing people into tapping into that knowledge.

The more empathy you have and the more connected you are to society, the better off you'll be.

Empathy is what obsesses me. And watching empathy recede in the world is terrifying.

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.

I think the ability to empathize with another person's experience and go into the trajectory of their journey is challenging.