Quotes About Empathy

You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat.

Hence we inevitably see ourselves from outside, as others see us, and seek for their approval and sympathy, which is the greatest of social goods.

Now it seems to me that the right way to love a dog is to love him not as a person, but as a creature that has been raised to the edge of personhood, so as to look into a place that is opaque to him but from which emerge signals that he understands in another way than we who send them.

Your woman is gone and your heart is heavy. Words will not lighten the weight, and what is written is written. But let it also be put down that I grieve with you. ~Hasan~

I have always found that hell is other people.

I was not always that way, but perhaps the shadow Earth, where I spent so many years, mellowed me a bit, and maybe my hitch in the dungeons of Amber reminded me somewhat of the quality of human suffering. I do not know. I only know that I could not pass by the hurt I saw on the form of someone much like someone who had once been a friend.

Does anybody really care about a hungry cat, except for a few friends?

Their voices lack the thrust and dip of men chewing over their words and tasting them. They

No sense in looking for our differences when I had just met him.

I saw my face in your own. It was strange. I wanted to know you better.

For a moment, I felt that I saw something of pity and a strong love reflected there-and perhaps a touch of humor.

I am not unmindful of your thought processes as you speak. I feel the pain in your side, twin to my own. Yes, I know these things and more.

Curious, he thought, how, if you knew a person long enough, he could elicit every kind of emotion from you, every possible reaction, envy, admiration, pity, irritation, fury, fondness, jealousy, love, disgust. But in the end all human beings became candidates for compassion, all of us, without exception...and if we could recognize this from the beginning, what a saving in pain and grief and misery.

He winced at her efforts to mollify him. Why didn't she say she was disgusted with his behaviour, with his long absence, his infrequent superficial letters? And if she did say it - would he defend himself? Would he give reasons, try to explain how meaningless every endeavour seemed to him? No. For then she would start crying again, he would tell her to stop being silly, she would ask for details, and he would tell her to mind her own business.

Where was the line between compassion and foolishness, kindness and weakness? And that was from her position. From theirs, it might be a line between mercy and cruelty, consideration and callousness.

He placed his hand over his heart. In here, there is limitless room - happiness, kindness, sorrow, anger, friendship - everything fits in here.

Jis met?si ? šal?, vengdamas šuns ant kelio, geltono mišr?no, nusususio ir perkarusio. Manekas dirstel?jo pro užpakalin? stikl?, ar gyvulys laimingai per?jo gatv?. J? sutraišk? už j? važiuojantis sunkvežimis.

He wanted his noises to touch the others; friendly noises could melt hostility.

People forget how vulnerable they are despite their shirts and shoes and briefcases, how this hungry and cruel world could strip them, put them in the same position as my beggars.

Suffering is a form of egoism. I speak only of myself. I am not talking about her, saying what she was, making an overwhelming portrait (like the one Gide made of Madeleine). (Yet: everything is true: the sweetness, the energy, the nobility, the kindness.)

The grim egoism (egotism) of mourning of suffering

The gift is contact, sensuality: you will be touching what I have touched, a third skin unites us.

Where you are tender, you speak your plural.

Where there is a wound, there is a subject.