empathy

The way to understand any enemy is to realize that, from his perspective, he is not a villain but a hero.

Traveling on, the shaft of his light reached now a great, dully shining oblong, and he stopped, surprised. Then, through the glass sides, he saw bright shapes of fish wheel in schools down the opaque water, startled by the illumination. Coming at last, and so suddenly, on life like his own, Mr. Lecky moved closer. The fixed flood of his light enveloped these small fish dimly, glowed back on him. They came sliding, drifting, mouths in motion, gills rippling, up the light, against the glass. Their senseless round eyes stared at Mr. Lecky. Idling with great grace, the extravagant products of selective breeding - fringetails, Korean, calico - passed, swayed about, came languidly back. Moving faster, stub-finned, crop-tailed danios from the Malabar coast appeared, hovered, taking the light on their fat flanks, now spotted, now iridescent pearl or opal.Seeing so many of them, so eager and attentive, Mr. Lecky felt an unexpected compunction. He was their only proprietor; and soon, trapped unnaturally here in the big tank, they would starve to death. His light went back to a counter he had just passed, showing him again the half-noticed packages - food for birds and pet animals, food, too, for fish. Returning to the tank, his light found many of the fish still waiting, the rest rushing back. He went and took a package, tore the top off, and poured the contents onto the rectangle of open water. It would perhaps postpone the time when, having eaten each other, the sick remainder must die anyway.

I think that many people do not know what empathy is. They think empathy is understanding their own selves and then connecting with like-minded individuals, who of course will understand them since they all share the same ideas. Empathy has nothing to do with likemindedness; it has to do with being able to feel the things that others feel, even when you do not share the same ideas, life story, or absolutely nothing at all! When I hear someone say, __ don__ understand you_, that makes me feel sorry for them. I can even understand a rock, and they can__ understand me? My pet rocks have more empathy than they do.

Those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.

the more different you and I are, the less we will be able to identify with each other, and the more difficult it will to understand each other. If we can't see ourselves in another person at all__f his beliefs and background and reactions and emotions conflict too radically with our own__e often just withdraw the assumption that he is like us in any important way. That kind of dehumanization generally leads nowhere good.

You have to see everyone in relationship to you. Just because you understand the shit in someone else's life doesn't mean you don't stand up for your own

Author says that, while Eisenhower had other intellectual mentors, he learned how to lead men from Gen. Walter Krueger. Krueger was the first American enlisted man to rise to four-star general, and he so identified with those he led that he once invited a sentry out of the rain and gave him his own dry uniform.

Sometimes we call what we do not understand primitive, sometimes magic. Each of us has a perspective to which we are attached. We only understand the other in relation to what we already know, but by believing, sympathising, even empathising, sometimes we can see beyond the limits of our knowledge. The alternative is to ignore or to attack.

King and Gandhi had found a way to use aggressive impulses to resist injustice without hurting others. Where did the aggression go? The answer, as King would later tell Poussaint, was this: into the courage needed to resist without fighting back physically...

If the boundaries of the self are defined by what we feel, then those who cannot feel even for themselves shrink within their own boundaries, while those who feel for others are enlarged, and those who feel compassion for all beings must be boundless. They are not separate, not alone, not lonely, not vulnerable in the same way as those of us stranded in the islands of ourselves, but they are vulnerable in other ways. Still, that sense of the dangers of feeling for others is so compelling that many withdraw, and develop elaborate stories to justify withdrawal, and then forget that they have shrunk. Most of us do, one way or another.

If he__ not he should be by now. The things that happen to people we never really know. What happens in houses behind closed doors, what secrets_

Fear trumps empathy.

Help other people ,help themselves

How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another's heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known? Even if the world's rich and powerful were to put themselves in the shoes of the rest, how much would they really understand the wretched millions suffering around them? So it is when Orhan the novelist peers into the dark corners of his poet friend's difficult and painful life: How much can he really see?

Empathy plays a crucial role in the reduction of stress from the moment of birth.

Many of the great humanitarian and environmental campaigns of our time have been to make the unknown real, the invisible visible, to bring the faraway near, so that the suffering of sweatshop workers, torture victims, beaten children, even the destruction of other species and remote places, impinges on the imagination and perhaps prompts you to act.

He laughed and the others laughed with him, except Babe, who resented slightly that what he felt so deeply could be reduced to a humor.

When we fail to harmonize and integrate, living systems, from individuals to families and countries, tend to move toward either chaos or rigidity.