Quotes About Empathy

we all have some things we are ashamed of.

Mma Ramotswe smiled at her old friend. You can go through life and make new friends every year -- every month practically -- but there was never any substitute for those friendships of childhood that survive into adult years. Those are the ones in which we are bound to one another with hoops of steel. She reached out and touched Dr. Maketsi on the arm, gently, as old friends will sometimes do when they have nothing more to say.

There are plenty of good stories. There are plenty of good people who go through life without … well, without anger. Who are kind to other folk. Who don't rant and rage.

but then where would one end if one started to compose a list of the wrongs that this world had seen? Better perhaps, thought Mma Ramotswe, to make a list of those things that were right with the world, of people who had made life better for other people, or who had done what they had been called to do with honour and without complaint.

wrong to think the less of another for what he or she was. There was no moral obligation to like others, nor necessarily to enthuse over them, but we did have to recognize their equal worth.

If your friend smells of fish you should not try to let it affect your friendship. Everybody, thought Ranald Braveheart Macpherson, knows that.

and the vestiges of that early feeling were still there, as she could not bring herself to punish the snails or caterpillars for their depredations. They were her fellow creatures, after all. They had not asked to be snails or caterpillars, and they needed to eat, as we all did.

there was something that Isabel had said that always stuck in his mind. Remember what you have and the other person doesn't. It was simple--almost too simple--advice and yet, like all such home advice, it expressed a profound truth.

There were so many lives, she thought, that could only be led with difficulty, with pain, and because we were so bound up in our own lives, so many of these were invisible to us until suddenly we saw, and knew, and felt that sudden pang of human sympathy that comes with knowing.

It was curious how some people had a highly developed sense of guilt, she thought, while others had none.

Nihil humanum mihi alienum est

Love and compassion are the only balm

So much had occurred, and so many of the things that had happened were bad. And yet there had been good things—acts of kindness, acts of loyalty and generosity of spirit; why did we forget these and remember only the bad?

We should not be too surprised by the kindness of strangers, as it is always there.

acknowledge the unexpected exchange of fellow feeling between

It defeated him that anybody could ever bring such a result about if they knew, or could imagine, the heartbreak of the victim's family. Of course the people who did these things were usually deficient in moral imagination—they could not see what it would be like because they simply lacked the capacity to do so.

you did not look for a winner who would take everything; you found a way of allowing people to save face; you found a way of healing rather than imposing.

You might disagree with others for what they said or for what they did—that was one thing—but to take against them simply for what they were was to blame them for something over which they had no control, and was cruel, and profoundly wrong.

The human heart, you see, Mma Ramotswe, is pretty much the same wherever one goes.

We should love one another, she thought, not only because it was the right thing to do, but also because it was far easier than hating one another. People who hated often had to work quite hard at keeping their hatred warm.

She had brought all of this on herself, and so she had, in a sense, got what she deserved. But, even so, she had a soul like everyone else, and one should not crow over the defeat even of those who richly deserve to be defeated. That was dangerous, because then you yourself might get what you deserve for reveling in the misfortunes of another.

Never be put off by rudeness, Mma," she whispered. "It is the rude person who is rude, not you.

the names we gave to others, and the things we accused them of, often said more about us than they did about them.

Alexander McCall Smith