Quotes About Empathy

Gossip reduces the other to he/she, and this reduction is intolerable to me. For me the other is neither *he* nor *she* The other has only a name of his own, and her own name. The third person pronoun is a wicked pronoun; it is a pronoun of the non-person, it absents, it annuls.

People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.

The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee," he once said, "and I pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun.

The truth is I am an unlucky honest man that speaks my sentiments to all and with emphasis.

shall pass through this world but once. Any good thing therefore that I can do, any kindness I can show to any human being, let me do it now; let me not defer it nor neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.

He immediately had Rawlins summon stretcher bearers, but was dismayed when they removed the Union officer and overlooked the Confederate private. "Take this Confederate, too," he said. "Take them both together; the war is over between them." Grant seemed sickened by the carnage. "Let's get away from this dreadful place," he told an officer. "I suppose this work is part of the devil that is left in us all.

Summing up Grant's career, Frederick Douglass wrote: "In him the Negro found a protector, the Indian a friend, a vanquished foe a brother, an imperiled nation a savior.

In discussing this Romanian bloodletting with Simon Wolf, Grant declared that "respect for human rights" was the "first duty" of any head of state and that blacks and Jews should be elevated to a rank of "equality with the most enlightened." Grant showed surprising passion on the subject, saying "the story of the sufferings of the Hebrews of Roumania profoundly touches every sensibility of our nature.

Henceforth he would project himself into opponents' minds and comprehend their fears and anxieties instead of blowing them up into all-powerful bugaboos, giving him courage when others quailed.

He became known for breaking in wild horses for local farmers, a sight that drew admiring spectators to the village square. He tamed even the most refractory horses through a fine sensitivity to their nature rather than by his physical prowess. "If people knew how much more they could get out of a horse by gentleness than by harshness," Grant once observed, "they would save a great deal of trouble both to the horse and the man.

Like most people, Hamilton and Adams were preternaturally sensitive to flaws in the other that they themselves possessed.

Far from hiding Black Jack, the irascible John Custis doted on him, and when the little boy was five, he submitted a petition to the governor to free the boy "christened John but commonly called Jack, born of the body of his Negro wench young Alice."19 To celebrate his emancipation, the boy was given four slaves as playmates.20 Obviously John Custis didn't rate very highly as a child psychologist.

In the course of the panic, he provided almost $6 million to fifty-eight individuals and firms who were turned down by banks and desperately needed his intervention.

While reading the scene in Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy in which the tenderhearted Uncle Toby picks up a fly and delicately places it outside a window instead of killing it, Burr is said to have remarked, "Had I read Sterne more and Voltaire less, I should have known the world was wide enough for Hamilton and me.

To Rockefeller, the least imaginative use of money was to give it to people outright instead of delving into the causes of human misery.

because we don't have to talk. Often we sit fifteen minutes in silence before one of us breaks it!

giving him more generous sympathy than he received in return

Rockefeller followed Flagler's business adventures in Florida with sympathy but at a distance.

I am not a good one to judge such things: I am too soft-hearted.

Andrew Carnegie was truly saddened by the revelation of poor Pierpont's poverty. "And to think he was not a rich man

He is very well and jolly by bits but sometimes I see he feels as lonely as I do

I was almost overwhelmed.

Julia would gladly have stayed for one more term and had no qualms about scrapping George Washington's precedent. "Oh, Ulys! was that kind to me?" she protested. "Was it just to me?" "Well," he replied, "I do not want to be here another four years. I do not think I could stand it." Rather than feel sympathy for her husband's plight as a profoundly overburdened president, Julia chose to feel "deeply injured.

One is left to wonder whether Bill saw in Johnston a substitute son who might fill the large emotional void left by his formerly adoring eldest son.