Cognitive Empathy Quotes

Admiration is the emotion furthest from understanding. ~Sosuke Aizen

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.

There is still a popular fantasy, long since disproved by both psychoanalysis and science, and never believed by any poet or mystic, that it is possible to have a thought without a feeling. It isn’t. When we are objective we are subjective too. When we are neutral we are involved. When we say ‘I think’ we don’t leave our emotions outside the door. To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

Nobody knows what another person is thinking. They may imagine they do, but they are nearly always wrong.

It is debatable which is causing us more harm - hot-headed ignorance or cold-hearted intellectualism.

Natural knowledge has not forgone emotion. It has simply taken for itself new ground of emotion, under impulsion from and in sacrifice to that one of its 'values', Truth.

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

When we feel deeply, we reason profoundly.

There can be no knowledge without emotion. We may be aware of a truth, yet until we have felt its force, it is not ours. To the cognition of the brain must be added the experience of the soul.

Empathy begins with understanding life from another person's perspective. Nobody has an objective experience of reality. It's all through our own individual prisms.

Batman gets close to the insanity of Gotham, to the craziness, to what drives that city mad, and not be driven mad himself - or, at least, most of the time he isn't. That's most like the mission of the C.I.A. We get into the heads of our enemies without becoming our enemy.

Many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know. I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. The wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

A symbol serves to combine heart and intellect.

There is no human being who having both passions and thoughts does not think in consequences of his passions--does not find images rising in his mind which soothe the passion with hope or sting it with dread.

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.

Without love, intelligence is dangerous; without intelligence, love is not enough.

To know how to think with emotions and to feel with intellect.

But what are you going to do about the people who are cursed with both hearts and brains?

Some day, the world will discover that, without thought, there can be no love.

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

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

Every time I read anything, whether it be a book, a script, or anything, I automatically imagine myself as the boy in the plot. I don't know why. Seriously, anything. If I'm reading a magazine article or whatever, I picture myself as the kid people are talking about. It's really weird. I don't know why I do that.

It was easier to know a character's point of view than it was to figure out what your point of view was.

Intelligence makes sincerity difficult.

Can you step back from your own mind and thus understand all things?