empathetic perspective Quotes

The essence of love and compassion is understanding, the ability to recognize the physical, material, and psychological suffering of others, to put ourselves "inside the skin" of the other. We "go inside" their body, feelings, and mental formations, and witness for ourselves their suffering. Shallow observation as an outsider is not enough to see their suffering. We must become one with the subject of our observation. When we are in contact with another's suffering, a feeling of compassion is born in us. Compassion means, literally, "to suffer with."

You end up becoming someone you see in the eyes of those you love.

Surprisingly, it's forgiveness, not guilt, that increases accountability. Researchers have found that taking a self-compassionate point of view on a personal failure makes people more likely to take personal responsibility for the failure than when they take a self-critical point of view. They also are more willing to receive feedback and advice from others, and more likely to learn from the experience.

Empathy is forgetting oneself in the joys and sorrows of another, so much so that you actually feel that the joy or sorrow experienced by another is your own joy and sorrow. Empathy involves complete identification with another.

Rather than seeing dreams as containing hidden messages, see dreams as experiences of empathy. Then use empathy with the dream to reconnect with the experience of dreaming itself.

Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.

To see with the eyes of another, to hear with the ears of another, to feel with the heart of another. For the time being, this seems to me an admissible definition of what we call social feeling.

If there is love, there is hope that one may have real families, real brotherhood, real equanimity, real peace. If the love within your mind is lost and you see other beings as enemies, then no matter how much knowledge or education or material comfort you have, only suffering and confusion will ensue.

I call him religious who understands the suffering of others.

The key to happiness, she said, is tolerance of those who do not do as you do.' 'What if those who do not do as you do are gunning you down?' I said.... Alaska frowned. 'Guns are intolerant. Guns are a failure of communication.

Developing concern for others, thinking of them as part of us, brings self-confidence , reduces our sense of suspicion and mistrust, and enables us to develop a calm mind.

I think the essence of [Kurt] Vonnegut's humanism lay in his emphasis on human kindness as, so to speak, our saving grace.

It's a fact that it is much more comfortable to be in the position of the person who has been offended than to be the unfortunate cause of it.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people's places. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

I had a cheat sheet because I knew Tarell [Alvin McCraney]. His movie is largely autobiographical. I knew about certain events in his life and some of the people he talks about. I had visited the place where he lived many times so I understood innately what that was.

If you concern yourself mainly with others, the broader your thinking becomes, and life’s inevitable difficulties disturb you less.

Only the development of compassion and understanding for others can bring us the tranquility and happiness we all seek.

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

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.

Most women got this thing called compassion. It doesn't make them foolish, just more forgiving. More capable of trying and hoping things worked out.

Comparing oneself to others in such terms as "Just as I am so are they, just as they are so am I," he should neither kill nor cause others to kill.

When I tried this morning, after an hour or so of unhappy thinking, to dip back into my meditation, I took a new idea with me: compassion. I asked my heart if it could please infuse my soul with a more generous perspective on my mind's workings. Instead of thinking that I was a failure, could I perhaps accept that I am only a human being--and a normal one, at that?

We have to start treating each other as if we are treating ourselves living another life.

One must put oneself in every one's position. To understand everything is to forgive everything.

It is good to be attracted out of ourselves, to be forced to take a near view of the sufferings, the privations, the efforts, the difficulties of others.