empathy

Nothing renews my faith in humanity more than the exchange of compassion so profound that mere words cannot embrace it.

There's something in everyone only they know.

The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy, we can all sense a mysterious connection to each other.

All that we can't say is all we need to hear.

Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart__ revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self__ own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.

Judgement is always based on experience and sometimes you will battle a person's history first, before commonsense will ever win the war.

Mental illness is not a fraternity or a social club for like minds. It is its own religion to each person that has it. Their mind is their pastor, their feelings are their scriptures and their delusions are their own bible story. To break them free, is to break their faith in signs. That is why so many feel lost.

They say that wisdom comes from suffering. This is not true. Wisdom comes from having unconditional empathy for all mankind. Any man filled with empathy is capable of gaining valuable insights on the human condition through the suffering of others. You do not need to suffer to know suffering, but you need empathy first to identify and feel the suffering of others around you. If you do not feel love for all mankind, nor see everyone around you as a valuable human and an extension of yourself, then you will never feel real empathy. And if you do not have empathy, then you will not gain, learn and remember valuable knowledge from your experiences, or those around you, so that you one day become wise. Yet most importantly, wisdom comes from having a good memory. If you do not remember anything, or are so disconnected from basic humanism to even care to dissect lessons to be gained from every experience in your life and from those around you - using simple reason and the juggling of feelings, then wisdom will forever remain a faraway planet to you.

Compassion can be learned through example

Half the point in reading novels and seeing plays and films is to exercise the faculty of sympathy with our own kind, so often obliterated in the multifarious controls and compulsions of actual social existence.

The counsellor who never reads a novel or never opens a book of poetry is neglecting an important resource for empathic development.

A narcissist with power will attempt to prove in the world only what is already in his head. He can't 'see' otherwise. For him, the 'outside world' is not beyond him and does not question or challenge him and his ideas. He is the world. Others will assent to his distorted worldview, because he is powerful, not because he is believable. If he possesses any reflection, that will be exactly what will gnaw at the narcissist with power most of all: his 'truths' are inauthentic, and he is a human being without integrity. The very narcissism and power he possesses prevent him from an ongoing relationship with the truth, which begins with self-humility and the curiosity this can create in a person.

If you will read and listen, you will admit a multiplicity of voices and points of view, consider them with some humility, allow them gracious entrance however strident or discordant some of them may sound, then you will grow and change, and each of these voices will become a constituent part of who you become, an atom of growing being. It is literature and only literature than can do this.

The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny.

If art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally.

And if, as all philosophers on the subject have noted, art is a human activity that relies on the senses to reach the soul, did it not also stand to reason that dogs -- at least dogs of Mr. Bones' caliber -- would have it in them to feel a similar aesthetic impulse? Would they not, in other words, be able to appreciate art? As far as Willy knew, no one had ever thought of this before. Did that make him the first man in recorded history to believe such a thing was possible? No matter. It was an idea whose time had come. If dogs were beyond the pull of oil paintings and string quartets, who was to say they wouldn't respond to an art based on the sense of smell? Why not an olfactory art? Why not an art for dogs that dealt with the world as dogs knew it?

Critics are only concerned with what affects them. And feeling empathy is a gift not many possess.

...to make art is to realize another's sadness within, realize the hidden sadness in other people's lives, to feel sad with and for a stranger.