Social Empathy Quotes

Anyone can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend's success.

I have so many people out there that celebrate with me when they know that I'm happy. And they hate it when they know that I'm suffering because someone has hurt me.

One of the primary tests of the mood of a society at any given time is whether its comfortable people tend to identify, psychologically, with the power and achievements of the very successful or with the needs and sufferings of the underprivileged.

People don't want to see me having a bad morning. They have job problems, financial problems, family pressures, kids to get off to school. The last thing they want to wake up to is someone showing them the same problems. So maybe that's the one time I am forced to act.

Is there anything more dangerous than sympathetic understanding?

I feel for the cops; I feel for us as a society as a whole, period.

Speaking for the nation as a whole entails understanding and feeling the pain, as well as understanding the aspiration of the different cultural, social and political make-up of the nation.

Bottom 10 Percent progressives are not enthusiastic about concentrations of wealth. But that's not what keeps them up at night. Their focus is on deprivation and lack of opportunity. They're motivated by empathy for people who are suffering, rather than outrage over unjustified wealth.

The American Negro has no conception of the hundreds of millions of other non-whites' concern for him: he has no conception of their feeling of brotherhood for and with him.

I would have a poet able bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions.

I don't pretend that I can imagine myself as a Palestinian.

Fundamentally, if people don't feel like their lives are valued and they don't value their lives, they're not going to value their neighbors' lives.

There is absolutely no single aspect of one's personality that is more important to develop than empathy, which is not a skill at which men typically are asked to excel. I believe empathy is not only the core of art, literature and music, but should also be at the core of society, from ethics to economics.

Distance is where people get really confused. If you stand really far away from someone you're like, "That's not me. I'm so far away from that person. That person is so different from me." It's easy to forget that people - refugees from Syria, for example - are exactly like us.

A fundamental concern for others in our individual and community lives would go a long way in making the world the better place we so passionately dreamt of.

When we are out of sympathy with the young, then I think our work in this world is over.

Anybody who has children and children who are well feels a sense of responsibility towards parents and kids and families that are struggling and that aren't well.

When I go to a great movie, I can live somebody else's life a little bit for a while. I can walk in somebody else's shoes. I can see what it feels like to be a member of a different gender, a different race, a different economic class, to live in a different time, to have a different belief.

You know that sadness and rage you feel about your money? That's the way some of us feel about people.

Our poor people are great people, a very lovable people, They don't need our pity and sympathy. They need our understanding love and they need our respect. We need to tell the poor that they are somebody to us that they, too, have been created, by the same loving hand of God, to love and be loved.

I don't know if it is a spiritual, physiological or psychological phenomenon, but I believe now more than ever that singing is a universal, built-in mechanism designed to cultivate empathy and compassion.

Watching the news, there seems to be an empathy failure and miscommunication.

A test of a people is how it behaves toward the old. It is easy to love children. Even tyrants and dictators make a point of being fond of children. But the affection and care for the old, the incurable, the helpless are the true gold mines of a culture.

If we treasure our own experience and regard it as real, we must also treasure other people's experience.

It is only possible through the fact that sympathy for the general life and suffering of mankind is very weakly developed in the individual.