Others, though, talk about her gentleness, empathy and swiftness to burst into a joyous and slightly dirty laugh.
She's a cliché — brittle, sexless, friendless, cheerless and all the rest — but what makes her work is her unnerving banality, visible in the blank canvas of a face that looks untouched by gentleness or empathy.
But both the movie and the Walter Isaacson biography from which it was adapted make it equally clear that Mr. Jobs fell far short in the balancing opposites: humility, gentleness, composure, empathy, and ultimately, even humanity.
(p. 28) Overall, the personal qualities cultivated through mindfulness practice are nonjudging, nonstriving, acceptance, patience, trust, openness, letting go, gentleness, generosity, empathy, gratitude and lovingkindness [ 97] - qualities which are highly relevant to the personal recovery journey of people with mental illness.
While there are certainly many people throughout time who've changed the world and have not been kind or compassionate (or even great leaders for that matter), it's the ones who operate with gentleness, concern for others, integrity, empathy, truthfulness, and service who make a different kind of mark – a more evolved, expansive and memorable one -- that heals while it innovates.
Kindness and gentleness never had a gender, and neither did empathy.
Ronald Reagan's air of gentleness was such that few people noticed, or could believe they were noticing, that he had little private empathy with them.
"The Unknowable" (2004): Edmund Morris on Ronald Reagan's mysterious life: "Reagan's air of gentleness was such that few people noticed, or could believe they were noticing, that he had little private empathy with them," Morris writes.
