“I’ve always treasured empathy as the particular privilege of the invisible, the observers who are shy precisely because they sense so much—because it is overwhelming to say even a single word when you’re sensitive to every last flicker of nuance in the room.”— Leslie Jamison, amazon.com
“The real heroes anyway aren’t the people doing things; the real heroes are the people noticing things, paying attention.”— John Green, amazon.com
“Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see.”— Leslie Jamison, amazon.com
“Opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding. The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world. It requires profound purpose larger than the self kind of understanding.”— Bill Bullard, web.archive.org
“If you look for the bad in people expecting to find it, you surely will.”— Abraham Lincoln, amazon.com
“It’s all fine to say, ‘Time will heal everything, this too shall pass away. People will forget’ - and things like that when you are not involved, but when you are there is no passage of time, people do not forget and you are in the middle of something that does not change.”— John Steinbeck, amazon.com
“The way we imagine 'us' must include people living in poverty, because there is just the one world.”— John Green, youtube.com
“The reach of my online life can feel infinite, but it isn't. And that inevitably creates an empathy gap. As Bill and Melinda put it in their letter, "There is overwhelming evidence that people care about others who are suffering when they can see that suffering.”— John Green, youtube.com
“The only good thing about Valentine's Day is that gift-giving, while it is economically inefficient, is also kind of an act of empathy, right? You have to imagine what it's like to be someone else, imagine what they would want, and then get it for them.”— John Green, youtube.com
“The job of reading is not to understand the author's intent; the job of reading is to use stories as a way into seeing other people as we see ourselves.”— John Green, youtube.com
“Reading with an eye toward metaphor allows us to become the person we're reading about while reading about them.”— John Green, youtube.com
“Old souls know that there’s always more than one way to look at something, and they can put themselves in someone else’s shoes.”— Jen Hubley Luckwaldt, rodalesorganiclife.com
“Kneel not to me: the power that I have on you is to spare you; the malice towards you to forgive you. Live! And deal with others better.”— William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, amazon.com
“There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts.”— Neil Gaiman, amazon.com
“Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds... Not just one world. Hundreds of t…”— Neil Gaiman, amazon.com
“Maybe sex, in its shocking intimacy and unavoidable closeness, can act as a balm for all that digital distance. Maybe if you start to see other people as merely their profile pictures and Tinder bios, it can bridge the digital-analog gap to see their face twist up in pleasure, hear their moans and s…”— Kate Sloan, theestablishment.co
“Have sex a few times and you quickly learn: The person you’re banging is just another human, like you.”— Kate Sloan, theestablishment.co