Quotes About Empathy

But I will tell you what I say to my children: 'Go where you will; commit what crime you may; fall to what depth of degradation you may; you can never commit any crime that will shut my door, my arms, or my heart to you. As long as I live you shall have one sincere friend.

but if there is the smallest seed of good in any human heart, let kindness fall upon it until it grows, and in that way I know, and so do you, that the world will get better and better day by day.

For my part, I am willing to give up heaven to get rid of hell. I had rather there should be no heaven than that any solitary soul should be condemned to suffer for ever and ever.

I believe that all actions that tend to the well-being of sentient beings are virtuous and moral.

We cannot assist the Infinite, but we can assist our fellow-men.

How could the death of someone you had never met affect you so?

People do kill themselves, you know, Miranda, when they think their whole reason for living is being taken away from them. Even the fact that other people think their suffering is a joke isn't enough to shake them out of it.

Many lonely people, Strike knew, found it pleasant to be the focus of somebody's undivided attention and sought to prolong the novel experience.

He was sorry, genuinely sorry, for the pain she was in. Yet the revelation had caused certain other feelings—feelings he usually kept under tight rein, considering them both misguided and dangerous—to flex inside him, to test their strength against their restraining bonds.

If I've taken you for granted," said Strike, "I'm sorry. You're the best I've got." "Oh, for fuck's sake, Strike," said Robin, abandoning the pretense that she wasn't crying as she snorted back tears.

After a short pause, she said, "I don't think I'll be here for my next birthday, Corm." The words hit him like a punch in the diaphragm. "Don't say that." "If I can't say it to you, who can I say it to?

The dead could only speak through the mouths of those left behind, and through the signs they left scattered behind them. Strike had felt the living woman behind the words she had written to friends; he had heard her voice on a telephone held to his ear; but now, looking down on the last thing she had ever seen in her life, he felt strangely close to her.

He felt as though his capacity for loving had been blunted, the nerve endings severed.

A lot of men find it hard to hear how well their other halves get on with other men.

blood was thumping in her ears: the sensation of not being heard was becoming increasingly common during these interactions)

where there's no capacity for joy, there's no capacity for goodness.

No stranger to trouble myself, I am learning to care for the unhappy. Virgil, Aeneid,

The argument had been in full swing when Matthew's father telephoned with the news that a funny turn Matthew's mother had suffered the previous week had been diagnosed as a mini-stroke. After this, she and Matthew felt that squabbling about Strike was in bad taste, so they went to bed in an unsatisfactory state of theoretical reconciliation, both, Robin knew, still seething. It was

He would never know what it was like to feel yourself small, weak and powerless. He would never understand what rape did to your feelings about your own body: to find yourself reduced to a thing, an object, a piece of fuckable meat.

the time he spent on Saturday morning, crafting a response to Al's latest text message on the subject. He finally chose brevity over further argument: Haven't changed my mind, but no hard feelings or bitterness this end. Hope all goes well & let's get a beer when you're next in town.

there's one thing I 'ate, it's treating people diff'rent because of where they were born.

but each of those negative images represented a human whose heart had once beaten, whose ambitions and opinions, triumphs and disappointments had been as real Margot Bamborough's...

how happy I should feel if I could succeed in bringing a little light into all this murky ugliness. Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

But he was her best friend.