Jo Ellen > Jo's Quotes

“Some people think only intellect counts: knowing how to solve problems, knowing how to get by, knowing how to identify an advantage and seize it. But the functions of intellect are insufficient without courage, love, friendship, compassion, and empathy.”
― Dean Koontz

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin

“No one cares how much you know, until they know how much you care”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“I call him religious who understands the suffering of others.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and, therefore, the foundation of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.”
― J.K. Rowling

“Thanksgiving dinner's sad and thankless. Christmas dinner's dark and blue. When you stop and try to see it From the turkey's point of view.

Sunday dinner isn't sunny. Easter feasts are just bad luck. When you see it from the viewpoint of a chicken or a duck. Oh how I once loved tuna salad Pork and lobsters, lamb chops too Till I stopped and looked at dinner From the dinner's point of view.”
― Shel Silverstein

“It is not learning we need at all. Individuals need learning but the culture needs something else, the pulse of light on the sea, the warm urge of huddling together to keep out the cold. We need empathy, we need the eyes that still can weep.”
― Lydia Millet, Oh Pure And Radiant Heart

“Education leads to enlightenment. Enlightenment opens the way to empathy. Empathy foreshadows reform.”
― Derrick A. Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism

“Anguish is the universal language”
― Alice Fulton

“If literature does one thing, it makes you more empathetic by making you live other lives and feel the pain of others. Ideologues don't feel the pain of others because they haven't imaginatively got under their skins.”
― Yann Martel

“The crisis besetting America is not just an economic or political crisis; something deeper is wreaking havoc across the land, a mercenary and utilitarian attitude that demonstrates little empathy for people's actual well-being, that dismisses imagination and thought, branding passion for knowledge as irrelevant.”
― Azar Nafisi, The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books

“...Because a book is a little empathy machine. It puts you inside somebody else’s head. You see out of the world through somebody else’s eyes. It’s very hard to hate people of a certain kind when you’ve just read a book by one of those people.”
― Neil Gaiman

“A book is a little empathy machine. It puts you inside somebody else's head. You see out of the world through somebody else's eyes. It's very hard to hate people of a certain kind when you've just read a book by one of those people.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Empathy isn't just listening, it's asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

“This is what differentiates sympathy from empathy. No matter how much I care for you, it's not until I recognize me in you and you in me that the veil of gauze is lifted on the world.”
― Jackson Galaxy, Cat Daddy: What the World's Most Incorrigible Cat Taught Me About Life, Love, and Coming Clean

“...empathy is the most important power there is. Without it, we are doomed. With it, we can truly change the world.

(interview from USC)”
― Deborah Harkness

“How does one develop compassion for someone with a completely different set of values without reading something from their point of view? Books are one of the ways in which we can truly get into the heads of people we would never meet in our ordinary lives and travel to countries we would otherwise never visit.”
― Jennifer Steil, The Woman Who Fell from the Sky

“Fiction challenges us and works its miracles by placing us in the skin of another human being and teaching us empathy.”
― Hugh Howey