Quotes About Empathy

The remarkable thing about Jesus was that, although he came from the middle class and had no appreciable disadvantages himself, he mixed socially with the lowest of the low and identified himself with them. He became an outcast by choice.

Jesus was immeasurably more human than other human beings

That which we do for ourselves dies with us … that which we do for others lives forever.

Above all things let us never forget that mankind constitutes one great brotherhood; all born to encounter suffering and sorrow, and therefore bound to sympathize with each other.

Unicorns, dragons, witches may be creatures conjured up in dreams, but on the page their needs, joys, anguishes, and redemptions should be just as true as those of Madame Bovary or Martin Chuzzlewit.

The various qualities of my readings seem to permeate my every muscle, so that, when I finally decide to turn off the library light, I carry into my sleep the voices and the movements of the book I've just closed.

Lesen ist eine Erinnerungsarbeit, bei der wir durch Geschichten in den Genuss der vergangenen Erfahrungen anderer kommen, als wären es unsere eigenen.

The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.

For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.

It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'Try to be a little kinder.

It's a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research & study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.

I can sympathize with people's pains, but not with their pleasure. There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.

But then every man is ludicrous if you look at him from outside, without taking into account what's going on in his heart and mind.

To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.

It's embarrassing to tell you this, but it seems to come down mostly to just learning to be kinder.

One touches and, in the act of touching, one's touched.

When one individual comes into intimate contact with another, she—or he, of course, as the case may be—must almost inevitably receive or inflict suffering.

Being cared for when one is dead is less satisfactory than being cared for when one is alive.

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude.

The values, first of all, of individual freedom, based upon the facts of human diversity and genetic uniqueness; the values of charity and compassion, based upon the old familiar fact, lately rediscovered by modern psychiatry - the fact that, whatever their mental and physical diversity, love is as necessary to human beings as food and shelter; and finally the values of intelligence, without which love is impotent and freedom unattainable.

Those who crusade not for God in themselves but against the devil in others, never succeed in leaving the world better, but leave it as it was or sometimes even perceptibly worse than it was before the crusade began.

One is always alone in suffering; the fact is depressing when one happens to be the sufferer, but it makes pleasure possible for the rest of the world.

To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift.